A tool that takes virtually any input (Windows Event Viewer thingies, Unix Syslogs, Router Syslogs, Squid logs), and can correlate all of the events.
I know there's a Cisco-ish product that you can do this, and it monitors for certian 'bad' things happening on your network, and can send emails to a certian person or whatever.
Although, given the state of things, the ability to look back and see the state of the network at a given point to track down a user would be mighty handy as well. (When a user logged on, which URL's they accessed, when, what else they did, and so on)
Cisco rocks for support. I can open a case online, within 20 minutes have a call back. And, I can say I've tried x,y,z, and if they have any ideas, and say 'i think there is a hardware problem', and they go 'ok, what's the part number, and have a part on my doorstep the next day'.
For what it's worth, if you ever do anything mission critical, or pseudo mission critical with Cisco stuff, ask one of their SE's to look over your config. They'll do it for free if you are buing their hardware (and, I suppose, are paying enough.) I know that the 6509 in this case was probably around $120k, so they probably would have done this for free, and it could have alleviated this problem in the first place. Then again, hind sight is always right.
Then again, i've also had good luck with Sun support on hardware. I haven't used them for software that much,however.
"Guns simply don't have a place in a modern society"
Yeah, but rocks can kill people too. The problem is much bigger than just the guns. Yes, guns are easiest, but not the only method of killing people. Make guns illegal, and they'll use knives. Make knives illegal and they'll use...
I hate the media. Who do I blame for these incidents? I blame the media. If you tell someone something often enough, they begin to believe it. The media has been focusing on the fact of 'how bad the teens are today' for the past 30 years. Eventually people begin to believe that they are. And, of course, todays teens act accordingly. I also detest the fact that the media spreads so much FUD about something. Yeah. Lets go out and find something that happens to 1 in 10,000,000 people. Make it sound like a big deal, and blow it WAY out of proportion. Instead of focusing on someone doing good things, helping out their fellow man, they focus on the negative things in society. Unfortunatly, it seems, that many people don't want to see the good in society. I'm not saying that the negative shouldn't be brought out, i'm just saying that they focus on the negative. Watch the nightly news. I assure you the first 5 stories are about someone killing someone, some political scandal, or someone dying. Too bad at least one of those 5 lead ins couldn't be about the person that helped someone out. Anyhoo. Me.
Okay. Say some company that comes out with a web server that can put out 1,000,000 web pages a second. Yeah. One _million_ web pages a second.
But, there's one downside. The server is very flaky. It needs rebooting. You pretty much have to have a staff of 20 fulltime 24/7 people to keep it running.
Meanwhile. Someone else has a web server that only puts out 750,000 wp/s. However, you can have a single person run the server from 8-5.
Anyhoo. Granted. These are benchmarks and only benchmarks. I'd be more interested in seeing more 'real world' benchmarks. I don't know why, exactly, you'd spend 100k on a quad xeon, when you could have 10 dual xeons for that much and have redundancy and redundancy.
And, I doubt that it's very realistic to serve all dynamic pages from a single box. As everyone knows, slashdot runs both from a single box, or has up until a few weeks ago. At around 500k hits a DAY it poops out. IF you were doing a large volume site than that, you'd need multiple db servers and stuff.
Anyhoo.
It just reminded me of the Hulking Giants and the Priesthood of the IBM computers from the early 60's. A company called Digital came along and didn't require all of the people to maintain the computer like the Hulking Giants required.
I realize that there will always be competition between people. I realize that your X is better than someone else's Y.
But, give me a break people. I'm on the Window Maker Mailing list. Someone asked a question on if they could get rid of the dock & the clip through checkboxes, and how he was using E right now, but wanted to use WM. All the person got was flames. Instead of a simple 'no', or a reason for a 'no', there were several postings about how much E sucks. How much GTK sucks. Absolutley nothing constructive of this question happened. One of the last postings to the thread pointed out that the binary already has some of these flags built in.
Yes, the RedHat distribution is different of that of Debian or Slackware. I don't really care for it much. However, the fact that RedHat has brought us more choice outweighs my dislike of RedHat. Like it or not, GNOME is going to help the Linux community grow. So will KDE.
Which is better? vi or emacs? E or WM? Ford or Chevy? 351 Winston or a 350 short block?
I'm also a believer that good does, in fact, come from flame wars. I know that I have learned quite a bit from them. It's also good to get various points on a specific topic.
But.
All in all. I would ask one thing. The next time you are going to flame someone about something trivial like asking what the 'ls' command does. Or if they can have checkboxes in WM to disable/enable functions. Don't flame them. Type out the message. Don't send it.
Just remember we all crawled at one time.
Also remember that (this isn't meant to be a flame, more that we all do it) 640k will be more than enough to run any computer software.
Amazingly enough, a lot of the problems with MacOS X server are also problems with Linux. But, in my humble opinion, Mac OS X Server is *NOT* a proven solution. Yes, BSD is. Yes, OpenStep mostly was. However, Mac OS X Server has only been out for a few months. One of the major things that I noticed while attempting to use my own MacOS X Server, was the lack of ability to add disks. Maybe i'm on crack. Maybe I could not read. But I could not get it to recognize other partitions on the same disk.
MacOS X Server, as far as scaling is concerned, Mac OS X Server doesn't do it. I don't care how fast a g3 is. It is NOT going to compare to a quad Pentium or quad Sparc machine. Period. EOF. Unfortunatly Apple Hardware can't seem to figure out how to put 2 power supplies in their cases either. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't bet the ranch on anything with a single ps.
Yeah. With any luck it will be as difficult to crack as that allmighty P-III id number thingy.
Give me a break. If it can be (cr)(h)acked. It will be. Biggest difference being, that instead of doing warez, where people tend to crack only things for whatever their primary os is, this mp3 'fingerprinting' thing will be something that will affect every mp3 user, across platforms. Forces untie!
I think that Microsoft should have a good, long look at The Pentagon Papers.
Remember the 'policing' of vietnam 30 years ago? Linux is guerilla warfare. Microsoft is going to try conventional tactics, and they are going to fail. People are going to use Linux because it WORKS.
Linux. It's oozing. It's creeping. Soon. It will BE EVERYWHERE!
You know. It's like, if you notice, the entire list of things. NOT A SINGLE THING LINUX DOES BETTER. Or even equivalant for that matter.
As far as a clear roadmap goes, I guess that depends on which day of the week you talk to Microsoft. Unfortunatly they don't know what they are doing either.
I also found it interesting that they changed columns in the article when pointing things. One Column, it's NT - Linux, the next column it's Linux - NT.
I also find it interesting that a lot of the inadequicies of Linux on the x86 platform have a direct relationship to the Microsoft/Intel megalopoly. Why, exactly, do we STILL have that 640k limit on boot? Yeah. Backwards compatibility, with WHAT! Dos 1.0?
Yeah. Linux doesn't offer some of the things that NT does. Linux is almost turning out to be the slut of the OS's. NT sure is pretty, but it doesn't put out. Linux puts out. And puts out well. OKay. Maybe that wasn't the best anology.
It's basically the same concepts with engines. The more heat created, the less efficient it is. Heat == inefficiency. Granted, engine heat comes from friction, and. um. stuff. but. um. yeah. *considers there aren't moving parts in chips* something like that.
HELLO. Give any software company a few months and they will be able to make their software faster JUST for this specific time. Sure, tweak source until you get it the fastest possible, tweak source, hardware, hardware, source. As far as I'm concerned, this isn't legit, or Oracle should get 6 months to make their software faster too.
I was thinking a few weeks ago. If someone donated 2 billion to the 'linux cause' it would generate something like 140 million a year in interest (assuming you put it in a bank at.07% interest) That would fund a LOT of projects. I believe that it should be done on a grant-style basis. Maybe have hardware that can be 'loaned' out. Have centralized hardware for people to try things out on. There would have to be some serious organization to it, and why person a) would get the xyz hardware when person b) would not. Even though they both work on simular projects. That's why i think a 'grant' type structure would work well. You would have to fill out paperwork....go before a board of some kind....but it would have to be equally available. Maybe for the release of your first project, the maximum available would be $1000. Second release would be a bit more...etc... For those of you who don't think this is a good idea, remember that many of the good things that are out there for linux are developed by people that also develop that piece of software for their employer, or their employer allows them to. Such as Enlighenment, Samba and the Kernel. I know that there are many other pieces of software that are out there that would be further along if they could work on it either full time or more than they are currently available. Maybe be a part of 'Linux International' or some such organization.
One of the things that i've done...is get like Window Maker (or KDE) and have 4 different desktops running. Then start launching applications. Keep launching them. Make them all launchable either from the clip (for instance). Launch them in different windows. Run xsnow in the root. Run gimp, netscape, xtetris....EVERYTHING humanly possible. Then point out that you are running 30 different (visible) applications. Ask for them to do that on their windows boxes. I've done this on a Cyrix 166 box with 64 mb ram and I was (unfortunatly) running CDE at the time. This is something simular that the pre-DR series of BeOS would do....when you start up the computer it would launch a bunch of applications...it was pretty nifty.
Always love the fact that they mention that Linux/*nix in general has a steep learning curve.
Should we bring up the fact that there are GIGANTIC VOLUMES written about the registry? I know i've seen several ~2k page books... Given the fact that my Perl book is less than 1k pages...and that's for a complete programming language...
Here we have around 30,000 email addresses and approximatly 70 sites nationwide, each with a Sun Ultra I and a Enterprise 10,000 in New York. The LDAP database runs on the enterprise server, and we use the Netscape Mail servers. For the most part,there have been very few problems. I imagine this would easily scale up to 150k+ users.
I by NO means am an LDAP guru. But here's my basic understanding of how it works. You have one server on a site. blahsv1.sitename.com. Everyone has me@sitename.com as their email address. LDAP gets the incoming mail and knows that it goes to blahsv1.sitename.com. So really, there is no reason that 150k users would be an issue.
Now...if you needed real logins on machines, we may have an issue...
Ever get the feeling that the Music Industry is missing the boat, and they aren't quite realizing that they hold the golden ticket? Maybe it's because for years and years they had one of the premier industries at least in the United States. In order to get your Music played, you HAD to go through the Music Industry. Now, it's completly possible for someone to have a top 10 hit without them. Unfortunatly/Fortunatly the internet is not just a fad. It is not going to go away. This COULD have been an excellent place for the music industry to say. Hey. You are reading the lyrics to Jimi Hendrix's 'Stone Free' (for instance) want to purchase a CD of it? Or, download an mp3? Or something simular? But instead they decide to shut it down. I do believe that the lyrics belong to whoever wrote them, i.e. 'Intellectual Property' I don't believe however, that the Music Industry has the rights to speak for millions of artists out there who've had their songs posted. It's not like the Music Industry hasn't made a few bucks off of Compact Discs. I imagine, these days, it costs less than $.50 US to make a cd, jewel case, liner notes included. They still cost around $15 apiece. What a crock.
I was looking at aluminum stuff at a local lumberyard/hardwarestore/manlytypeplace. And I bought an 8" long like 1/2" x 1/2" L for around $5. I would *really* like to build my own case that is double-wide, and has the ability to not have a cover, but look really cool without one. My current comuter is a 'small' tower with like 2 5 1/2" bays, and 2 internal 3.5" bays. Unfortuanatly:> i have 2 cdrom drives, and 4 hard drives. So. I stole a power supply from an old 486, and it's powering 2 hard drives. The power supply is sitting on top of the computer next to the two hard drives it powers. my modem is sitting on top of the entire mess:> cables everywhere, of course...
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...
I can see a definate downside to having all of this 'free' software (like WordPerfect for Linux for free). There are many people out there that assume that because a piece of softare is free, it is not a good piece of software. I agree with having commercial pricing. But, I also believe that if a large company like Corel or IBM would release thier software for free for anyone to use, that that would have to be intimidating to smaller companies that would be considering doing the same, and quite frankly monetarily impossible for the smaller companies.
It used to be that 'job security' meant that you would work at FoMoCo for all of your life putting that screw in that hole day after day. FoMoCo wouldn't lay you off..etc. But people didn't really have many skills either. Mechanics are a dime a dozen. So are IT people. The difference being, that almost every shop in town has a Network, and needs someone to provide TLC for it. So the shift is becoming that 'job security' means 'good skillset.' A good skillset and you will never have to look long to find a job, and you can constantly be asking for more and more money. Maybe you do get dumped by Xyz, Inc, but Xyzzy will pick you up.
One thing's for sure. This new-fangled internet thing surely won't just 'go away.'
Slashdot Mirror
Aka, the Bible. Or any other sci-fi.
A tool that takes virtually any input (Windows Event Viewer thingies, Unix Syslogs, Router Syslogs, Squid logs), and can correlate all of the events.
I know there's a Cisco-ish product that you can do this, and it monitors for certian 'bad' things happening on your network, and can send emails to a certian person or whatever.
Although, given the state of things, the ability to look back and see the state of the network at a given point to track down a user would be mighty handy as well. (When a user logged on, which URL's they accessed, when, what else they did, and so on)
Cisco rocks for support. I can open a case online, within 20 minutes have a call back. And, I can say I've tried x,y,z, and if they have any ideas, and say 'i think there is a hardware problem', and they go 'ok, what's the part number, and have a part on my doorstep the next day'. For what it's worth, if you ever do anything mission critical, or pseudo mission critical with Cisco stuff, ask one of their SE's to look over your config. They'll do it for free if you are buing their hardware (and, I suppose, are paying enough.) I know that the 6509 in this case was probably around $120k, so they probably would have done this for free, and it could have alleviated this problem in the first place. Then again, hind sight is always right. Then again, i've also had good luck with Sun support on hardware. I haven't used them for software that much,however.
"Guns simply don't have a place in a modern society"
Yeah, but rocks can kill people too. The problem is much bigger than just the guns. Yes, guns are easiest, but not the only method of killing people. Make guns illegal, and they'll use knives. Make knives illegal and they'll use...
I hate the media. Who do I blame for these incidents? I blame the media. If you tell someone something often enough, they begin to believe it. The media has been focusing on the fact of 'how bad the teens are today' for the past 30 years. Eventually people begin to believe that they are. And, of course, todays teens act accordingly. I also detest the fact that the media spreads so much FUD about something. Yeah. Lets go out and find something that happens to 1 in 10,000,000 people. Make it sound like a big deal, and blow it WAY out of proportion. Instead of focusing on someone doing good things, helping out their fellow man, they focus on the negative things in society. Unfortunatly, it seems, that many people don't want to see the good in society. I'm not saying that the negative shouldn't be brought out, i'm just saying that they focus on the negative. Watch the nightly news. I assure you the first 5 stories are about someone killing someone, some political scandal, or someone dying. Too bad at least one of those 5 lead ins couldn't be about the person that helped someone out. Anyhoo. Me.
Okay. Say some company that comes out with a web server that can put out 1,000,000 web pages a second. Yeah. One _million_ web pages a second.
But, there's one downside. The server is very flaky. It needs rebooting. You pretty much have to have a staff of 20 fulltime 24/7 people to keep it running.
Meanwhile. Someone else has a web server that only puts out 750,000 wp/s. However, you can have a single person run the server from 8-5.
Anyhoo. Granted. These are benchmarks and only benchmarks. I'd be more interested in seeing more 'real world' benchmarks. I don't know why, exactly, you'd spend 100k on a quad xeon, when you could have 10 dual xeons for that much and have redundancy and redundancy.
And, I doubt that it's very realistic to serve all dynamic pages from a single box. As everyone knows, slashdot runs both from a single box, or has up until a few weeks ago. At around 500k hits a DAY it poops out. IF you were doing a large volume site than that, you'd need multiple db servers and stuff.
Anyhoo.
It just reminded me of the Hulking Giants and the Priesthood of the IBM computers from the early 60's. A company called Digital came along and didn't require all of the people to maintain the computer like the Hulking Giants required.
I realize that there will always be competition between people. I realize that your X is better than someone else's Y.
But, give me a break people. I'm on the Window Maker Mailing list. Someone asked a question on if they could get rid of the dock & the clip through checkboxes, and how he was using E right now, but wanted to use WM. All the person got was flames. Instead of a simple 'no', or a reason for a 'no', there were several postings about how much E sucks. How much GTK sucks. Absolutley nothing constructive of this question happened. One of the last postings to the thread pointed out that the binary already has some of these flags built in.
Yes, the RedHat distribution is different of that of Debian or Slackware. I don't really care for it much. However, the fact that RedHat has brought us more choice outweighs my dislike of RedHat. Like it or not, GNOME is going to help the Linux community grow. So will KDE.
Which is better?
vi or emacs?
E or WM?
Ford or Chevy?
351 Winston or a 350 short block?
I'm also a believer that good does, in fact, come from flame wars. I know that I have learned quite a bit from them. It's also good to get various points on a specific topic.
But.
All in all. I would ask one thing. The next time you are going to flame someone about something trivial like asking what the 'ls' command does. Or if they can have checkboxes in WM to disable/enable functions. Don't flame them. Type out the message. Don't send it.
Just remember we all crawled at one time.
Also remember that (this isn't meant to be a flame, more that we all do it) 640k will be more than enough to run any computer software.
Read Me:
http://www.macintouch.com/mxshighavail.html
Amazingly enough, a lot of the problems with MacOS X server are also problems with Linux. But, in my humble opinion, Mac OS X Server is *NOT* a proven solution. Yes, BSD is. Yes, OpenStep mostly was. However, Mac OS X Server has only been out for a few months. One of the major things that I noticed while attempting to use my own MacOS X Server, was the lack of ability to add disks. Maybe i'm on crack. Maybe I could not read. But I could not get it to recognize other partitions on the same disk.
MacOS X Server, as far as scaling is concerned, Mac OS X Server doesn't do it. I don't care how fast a g3 is. It is NOT going to compare to a quad Pentium or quad Sparc machine. Period. EOF. Unfortunatly Apple Hardware can't seem to figure out how to put 2 power supplies in their cases either. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't bet the ranch on anything with a single ps.
Wheee.
Me.
Yeah. With any luck it will be as difficult to crack as that allmighty P-III id number thingy.
Give me a break. If it can be (cr)(h)acked. It will be. Biggest difference being, that instead of doing warez, where people tend to crack only things for whatever their primary os is, this mp3 'fingerprinting' thing will be something that will affect every mp3 user, across platforms. Forces untie!
Or unite.
Wheee.
I think that Microsoft should have a good, long look at The Pentagon Papers.
Remember the 'policing' of vietnam 30 years ago? Linux is guerilla warfare. Microsoft is going to try conventional tactics, and they are going to fail. People are going to use Linux because it WORKS.
Linux. It's oozing. It's creeping. Soon. It will BE EVERYWHERE!
(/sheerlinuxzealot)
You know. It's like, if you notice, the entire list of things. NOT A SINGLE THING LINUX DOES BETTER. Or even equivalant for that matter.
As far as a clear roadmap goes, I guess that depends on which day of the week you talk to Microsoft. Unfortunatly they don't know what they are doing either.
I also found it interesting that they changed columns in the article when pointing things. One Column, it's NT - Linux, the next column it's Linux - NT.
I also find it interesting that a lot of the inadequicies of Linux on the x86 platform have a direct relationship to the Microsoft/Intel megalopoly. Why, exactly, do we STILL have that 640k limit on boot? Yeah. Backwards compatibility, with WHAT! Dos 1.0?
Yeah. Linux doesn't offer some of the things that NT does. Linux is almost turning out to be the slut of the OS's. NT sure is pretty, but it doesn't put out. Linux puts out. And puts out well. OKay. Maybe that wasn't the best anology.
It's basically the same concepts with engines. The more heat created, the less efficient it is. Heat == inefficiency. Granted, engine heat comes from friction, and. um. stuff. but. um. yeah. *considers there aren't moving parts in chips* something like that.
Me.
HELLO. Give any software company a few months and they will be able to make their software faster JUST for this specific time. Sure, tweak source until you get it the fastest possible, tweak source, hardware, hardware, source. As far as I'm concerned, this isn't legit, or Oracle should get 6 months to make their software faster too.
Blah.
I was thinking a few weeks ago. If someone donated 2 billion to the 'linux cause' it would generate something like 140 million a year in interest (assuming you put it in a bank at .07% interest) That would fund a LOT of projects. I believe that it should be done on a grant-style basis. Maybe have hardware that can be 'loaned' out. Have centralized hardware for people to try things out on.
There would have to be some serious organization to it, and why person a) would get the xyz hardware when person b) would not. Even though they both work on simular projects. That's why i think a 'grant' type structure would work well. You would have to fill out paperwork....go before a board of some kind....but it would have to be equally available. Maybe for the release of your first project, the maximum available would be $1000. Second release would be a bit more...etc...
For those of you who don't think this is a good idea, remember that many of the good things that are out there for linux are developed by people that also develop that piece of software for their employer, or their employer allows them to. Such as Enlighenment, Samba and the Kernel. I know that there are many other pieces of software that are out there that would be further along if they could work on it either full time or more than they are currently available.
Maybe be a part of 'Linux International' or some such organization.
One of the things that i've done...is get like Window Maker (or KDE) and have 4 different desktops running. Then start launching applications. Keep launching them. Make them all launchable either from the clip (for instance). Launch them in different windows. Run xsnow in the root. Run gimp, netscape, xtetris....EVERYTHING humanly possible. Then point out that you are running 30 different (visible) applications. Ask for them to do that on their windows boxes.
I've done this on a Cyrix 166 box with 64 mb ram and I was (unfortunatly) running CDE at the time.
This is something simular that the pre-DR series of BeOS would do....when you start up the computer it would launch a bunch of applications...it was pretty nifty.
Always love the fact that they mention that Linux/*nix in general has a steep learning curve.
Should we bring up the fact that there are GIGANTIC VOLUMES written about the registry? I know i've seen several ~2k page books... Given the fact that my Perl book is less than 1k pages...and that's for a complete programming language...
We need to destroy this FUD tactic.
Here we have around 30,000 email addresses and approximatly 70 sites nationwide, each with a Sun Ultra I and a Enterprise 10,000 in New York. The LDAP database runs on the enterprise server, and we use the Netscape Mail servers. For the most part,there have been very few problems. I imagine this would easily scale up to 150k+ users.
I by NO means am an LDAP guru. But here's my basic understanding of how it works. You have one server on a site. blahsv1.sitename.com. Everyone has me@sitename.com as their email address. LDAP gets the incoming mail and knows that it goes to blahsv1.sitename.com. So really, there is no reason that 150k users would be an issue.
Now...if you needed real logins on machines, we may have an issue...
Ever get the feeling that the Music Industry is missing the boat, and they aren't quite realizing that they hold the golden ticket? Maybe it's because for years and years they had one of the premier industries at least in the United States. In order to get your Music played, you HAD to go through the Music Industry. Now, it's completly possible for someone to have a top 10 hit without them. Unfortunatly/Fortunatly the internet is not just a fad. It is not going to go away. This COULD have been an excellent place for the music industry to say. Hey. You are reading the lyrics to Jimi Hendrix's 'Stone Free' (for instance) want to purchase a CD of it? Or, download an mp3? Or something simular? But instead they decide to shut it down.
I do believe that the lyrics belong to whoever wrote them, i.e. 'Intellectual Property' I don't believe however, that the Music Industry has the rights to speak for millions of artists out there who've had their songs posted.
It's not like the Music Industry hasn't made a few bucks off of Compact Discs. I imagine, these days, it costs less than $.50 US to make a cd, jewel case, liner notes included. They still cost around $15 apiece. What a crock.
I was looking at aluminum stuff at a local lumberyard/hardwarestore/manlytypeplace. And I bought an 8" long like 1/2" x 1/2" L for around $5. I would *really* like to build my own case that is double-wide, and has the ability to not have a cover, but look really cool without one. My current comuter is a 'small' tower with like 2 5 1/2" bays, and 2 internal 3.5" bays. Unfortuanatly :> i have 2 cdrom drives, and 4 hard drives. So. I stole a power supply from an old 486, and it's powering 2 hard drives. The power supply is sitting on top of the computer next to the two hard drives it powers. my modem is sitting on top of the entire mess :> cables everywhere, of course...
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.
I can see a definate downside to having all of this 'free' software (like WordPerfect for Linux for free). There are many people out there that assume that because a piece of softare is free, it is not a good piece of software.
I agree with having commercial pricing. But, I also believe that if a large company like Corel or IBM would release thier software for free for anyone to use, that that would have to be intimidating to smaller companies that would be considering doing the same, and quite frankly monetarily impossible for the smaller companies.
It used to be that 'job security' meant that you would work at FoMoCo for all of your life putting that screw in that hole day after day. FoMoCo wouldn't lay you off..etc. But people didn't really have many skills either. Mechanics are a dime a dozen. So are IT people. The difference being, that almost every shop in town has a Network, and needs someone to provide TLC for it. So the shift is becoming that 'job security' means 'good skillset.' A good skillset and you will never have to look long to find a job, and you can constantly be asking for more and more money. Maybe you do get dumped by Xyz, Inc, but Xyzzy will pick you up.
One thing's for sure. This new-fangled internet thing surely won't just 'go away.'
okay. back to the crack pipe.