On Juniper, you can even get shell access by default (log in as root). The "command line" interface is just a program that runs on the shell.
Not only that, but Juniper's configuration is not as "modal" as the article makes everything out to be. JUNOS has built-in scripting to make modifications to the config, along with templating/macros to take the drudgery out of repeated configs. The config is hierarchical (XML on the backend), which makes it well-structured and predictable. Overall, it's a pleasure to work with (once you get used to it), and much better than some more popular/expensive networking gear I could name. Oh, and they number their interfaces starting with zero, like you should.;-)
Sure, it's not as open as a bash shell that you can muck with to your heart's content, but at the same time, having a standardized toolset means that it can be reasonably supported. Can you imagine calling up level 1 support and asking them to help you with a system that you had fully customized with local scripts, cron jobs, and the like?
What about the case of public health? Vaccines rely on "herd immunity" to be effective, so letting everyone pick and choose leads to a situation where not enough people are vaccinated to protect the population as a whole (as seen by outbreaks of measles in pockets of the country over the last year). There was an article written on this (which I can't find now) that was a great overview of the tension between one's individual rights to liberty and one's societal obligations not to kill people by willfully refusing something that has been demonstrated to work.
What if, for example, we found the "typhoid mary" for measles (someone who was asymptomatic, but carried the disease and spread it to others). They could be cured with the vaccine, but refuse to take it. Should the interest of the public health outweigh the individual right to refuse treatment in this case? If not, why should others perish? If so, then why not force vaccines on everyone? Where should the line be drawn?
Here in the US, we typically coerce vaccination by making it a prerequisite for public school (some states allow "personal" or "religious" exemptions, though). That way, people aren't "forced" to do it; life is just more unpleasant if they insist on skipping vaccines. Not sure if the UK has a similar system to encourage vaccination.
You can never know what the dealership is getting from the factory in terms of kickback, so it's next to impossible to negotiate a deal all by yourself. The sales rep is never going to lose money on the car (despite what they may tell you); they'll just walk away. So even when they cry and tell you you're keeping them from feeding their family just know that they're making enough to cover their expenses. Your best bet is to put your purchase out to bid to multiple dealerships and let them fight it out. We did this and saved $2500 off the "invoice" price that Consumer Reports said we should be "aiming for" to get a good deal.
Let me say it again: make them bid; it's the only way to keep them honest.
As a side bonus, you don't have to deal with crazy add-ons, haggling, or waiting for managers to "approve" your deal. You e-mail the dealerships, tell them what you want, and ask for their final, out-the-door, all-fees-included price. Pick the winning one, print out the e-mail so you have it in writing, and go to the dealership to pick up your car. If they try to add anything on, just point to your e-mail and invite them to throw it in for the included price you've already committed to (we got "free" floor mats and locking wheel nuts, probably because they didn't want to bother to take them off).
Note that you have to be willing to contact multiple dealers, wait for responses, and follow through. If you want to buy the brand-new 2014 model whatever, in hot pink, and you need it TODAY, then this isn't the strategy for you. If you're willing to be patient to save a couple grand, try it out.
We use Postini (now Google message security), and we turned on their SPF checks. Unfortunately, there are no knobs for this, so SPF pass is "good", SPF softfail is "bad", and SFP fail is "always quarantine, even if the address is whitelisted".
Despite some high-profile mail getting snagged by this, we educated our users and let them know that while we're more stringent with SPF than most places, it's not "our fault" that other people can't configure their domains correctly. After an initial spate of 10 or so messages where we had to call other IT departments to set them straight, it's more or less died down now and our users know how the problems get resolved.
We also created this page to send to the e-mail originator, so we didn't have to craft well-thought-out e-mail responses each time:
http://web.suffieldacademy.org/~jhealy/spf.html
All of this makes for a little more work for us, but it has cut down on spam. Also, it makes the internet a little better of a place as we slowly drag other domains into compliance by catching their mistakes.;-)
Wow, I would love for you to cite a reference for this.
You too. I'm not sure exactly where I come down on the organic debate yet, as there doesn't seem to be convincing evidence for either side. Most of the "evidence" I've seen for organic farming is that it's "more natural" and "doesn't use chemicals". The organic movement plays into this by advertising their products as "free from potentially harmful synthetic pesticides", while happily omitting the fact that they use non-synthetic pesticides. Organic farms are allowed to use as much non-synthetic pesticide as they want, you know. Just because it's "natural" doesn't automatically make it safer. Don't believe me? Try ingesting some all-natural arsenic or ricin sometime.
That said, I'm not super-psyched for prophylactic use of antibiotics, factory farming, or over-use of pesticides (of any kind), so "conventional" farming is no utopia. However, organic farming has to prove that it's actually better (not just "more natural") to justify the added expense and higher land use that they require. If someone has a peer-reviewed study demonstrating that organic food is more nutritious (all they studies I've seen says it isn't), has fewer pesticides (not just fewer "chemicals"), or otherwise superior, I'd like to see them. I haven't been able to find much hard data on the subject either way, and most of what I have found all leads back to one or two small or flawed studies.
For now, I'm trying to buy local more than organic, so at least it's fresh and perhaps doesn't require as many preservatives or pesticides.
I have one of those radios. For some reason, the Feds explicitly did not broadcast the test over NOAA emergency bands. Found that out afterwords, while trying to figure out why I didn't hear it.
Even better, recent versions of rsync allow you to shoehorn all metadata into xattrs on files, so you can (for example) store Mac OS X metadata and ACLs on a linux box with no special file system setup. You can even store the files as an unprived user and have the real perms stored in xattrs as well.
IANAL, but it's not quite as black-and-white as "if not under arrest, get up and leave". Make sure you're always courteous, even when you KNOW you're right.
Hawaii does this with their H-Power incinerator. It has a series of magnets to remove recyclable metals, and a series of filters to remove the most noxious substances. Yes, it does produce polution, but it's better to burn garbage than coal or oil. Also, it reduces landfill use, which is important in Hawaii, where land is at a premium.
I take care of about 500 macs (~450 laptop, ~50 desktop). We stick mainly with Apple's Imaging Services (especially with Mike Bombich's frontends) to install fresh machines.
I agree with other posters that just about any hard drive will do in this situation, especially given that everyone has an axe to grind about a particular manufacturer. FWIW, we've been having good luck with the LaCie drives of late (triple interface USB2/FW400/FW800), and they come in a variety of sizes, form factors, and speeds. We've had mixed results with Maxtor drives; the older revision all died with the click of death, though the newer ones are still going strong.
For on-the-go repairs, I like the bus-powered 2 1/2" drives. They're easy to carry, and don't require a power brick to go with them. Yeah, they're only 5400 RPM, but that's plenty fine for us. If you used compressed disk images and ASR (or Mike Bombich's NetRestore frontend), you get even better throughput since the computer will decompress on the fly. In this case, portability may be better than the increased spindle speed.
Also, if money really is no object, look into getting yourself a NetBoot server. If you do that, you don't even need a drive at all! Just hold down the "n" key on boot, and the machine will netboot to your restore image. From there, you can nuke & pave with the click of a button, and get back to doing real work (the machine will reboot itself when done). We use one here to image our lab machines, desktops, and laptops, and it really works great. Huge time-saver at the beginning of the year when we get new equipment. Obviously, this requires a decent core network if you don't want to slag the entire LAN, but if you've got a decent switched network this can work very well.
I'm not saying that it *isn't* Spotlight, but just about anything could be chewing up your battery. Widgets, indexing, screen savers, or even poor Engergy Saver settings. Have you checked to make sure that Spotlight is what's killing your battery?
Several people have been complaining about a bug in Tiger and the 2005 Powerbooks that has to do with the trackpad:
It seems that the new tracking features eat up a lot of processor time (and thus, a lot of battery as well).
Again, I'm not dissing the Spotlight issue: it's definitely something to look at. But if you're still having trouble, you might check on other factors that can kill your battery life.
So it looks pretty straight forward. If Apple says it can be done, chances are: (1) they've done it, (2) they've got documentation telling you how to do it, (3) it is possible.
I agree with (1) and (3), but (2) is nowhere close. Apple has done it, and it is possible, but the documentation is somewhat lacking. There are several gotchas to worry about (especially if you're doing stuff like roaming profiles on the windows boxes). If you read the Apple documentation, it makes it look like 30 minutes of work. In reality, a full integration like what the poster is looking for is several days of time...
Also, it should be noted that integrating windows with OD can only be done as an NT4-style domain; the OD server can't masquerade as an AD server. I think the submitter understands this, which is why they're trying to integrate a whole AD server into the Mac setup. Running the Mac for everything just won't work if you need true AD (which I assume they do).
Most of the OD/AD integration I've heard of has the OD taking orders from AD. This is mainly due to the fact that AD is proprietary crap that hasn't been reverse-engineered yet, so the easiest way to go is to slave off of it, rather than try to get MS to play nice with your open, standards-compliant system. Of course, this is exactly what MS wants (embrace and extend!), but until the Samba team gets enough donations to hack the AD protocols, that's probably the only option.
An agent (CSA) runs on all endpoints and checks them for AV, firewall, OS patches, etc. If it's clean, the switch or router let's them through to the main netowrk. If not, you get VLAN'd off to a remediation network, and once you are done there you are allowed on.
Not to sound like a sales guy, but Bradford Software has an appliance that's been doing this for over a year. It polls switches for clients, can perform port and VLAN management, and it does remediation scans. Best of all, it interoperates with most managed switching equipment from any vendor.
Also cool is the fact that it doesn't require software on the clients (I couldn't tell from your description if NAP requires this). The appliance scans the client machines with various penetration tools and automatically sends them to a remediation VLAN. Very helpful for rogue clients on the network.
I set up a centralized print server this year for my job. We have a collection of GCC Elite 12/600 and Apple LaserWriter 16/600 for most of our printers. Yeah, they're old, but they're frickin' TANKS and they run forever.
They're pretty well supported (LPD interface for network printing), though they have some bugs (international character sets, job name length, complex PS2 commands). Also, they're getting old, so they're slow(er), and low on memory.
We've started replacing them with the HP2420dn. I've only had them on the network for a few months, but no complaints as of yet. They talk IPP to our CUPS server beautifully, and the speed and print quality is fine for our needs. I don't know how well the parallel interface works on them (I only use ethernet), but for the moment, things are looking good.
The Java/OO vs Pascal/procedural is currently raging, both at the high school and college level. To be sure, there are advantages and disadvantages to each.
For more info, you should check out this ACM listserver posting on the subject, which the beginning of a long thread on this issue.
I don't think so. There are a lot simpler carrots and sticks available, in order of decreasing importance to the average teenage girl:
1) Telephone privs - no cell phone for you ...
While I'm sure there's some variance on this, I'd be willing to wager that IM has knocked out the phone as the most important thing. Sure, it's not the only thing, but judging from the kids at the school where I teach, IM is the major lifeline. After all, why talk with just one friend when you can "talk" with 20 at the same time?
It runs on an OpenBSD firewall (which may be a pain for you; not sure what you've got installed already).
Anyway, what it does is it prevents packets from flowing UNLESS the user has authenticated to the firewall via an ssh session. From there, the packets are tagged as belonging to the user, and you can deal with a particular user's packets as you wish (prioritize, block, redirect, etc).
If you could apply standard login controls (amount of time, time of day, etc), then you can effectively limit access to the internet with the same granularity...
(It would be nice to turn a couple of my DBs into a "single file with multiple tables", but hey, it works fine in multiple file mode, so like others say, why break it?)
Because the number of files is starting to get ridiculous. We use FM to store student records, grades, class schedules, team rosters, sports schedules, teacher names, pictures, parent information, and other sundry items. Relating all these things makes for a pretty crazy situation, especially with the "multiple file" joy.
Additionally, keeping track of each file (permissions, for example) is becoming a bit of a burden as well.
If you saw the sheer number of calculation fields we have that are going to be done away with using FM7... that's why we're looking to upgrade.
I'd like to think that I'm competent to replace the system. Let me put it this way: I'm competent enough to know how massive of an undertaking it would be. =)
I wouldn't be doing this just for the FOSS part of it; I have a legitimate need to open data access to other applications.
That said, that need pales in comparison to our need for a stable, easy-to-use system for the end-user. I'm mainly looking for suggestions (in case I missed some major product that could help me) so I can weigh alternatives (if any exist).
Believe me, I ain't going to touch this unless I have a strong feeling that it can be done correctly. Otherwise, it's back to TDV-dump-and export like I've been doing...
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On Juniper, you can even get shell access by default (log in as root). The "command line" interface is just a program that runs on the shell.
Not only that, but Juniper's configuration is not as "modal" as the article makes everything out to be. JUNOS has built-in scripting to make modifications to the config, along with templating/macros to take the drudgery out of repeated configs. The config is hierarchical (XML on the backend), which makes it well-structured and predictable. Overall, it's a pleasure to work with (once you get used to it), and much better than some more popular/expensive networking gear I could name. Oh, and they number their interfaces starting with zero, like you should. ;-)
Sure, it's not as open as a bash shell that you can muck with to your heart's content, but at the same time, having a standardized toolset means that it can be reasonably supported. Can you imagine calling up level 1 support and asking them to help you with a system that you had fully customized with local scripts, cron jobs, and the like?
What about the case of public health? Vaccines rely on "herd immunity" to be effective, so letting everyone pick and choose leads to a situation where not enough people are vaccinated to protect the population as a whole (as seen by outbreaks of measles in pockets of the country over the last year). There was an article written on this (which I can't find now) that was a great overview of the tension between one's individual rights to liberty and one's societal obligations not to kill people by willfully refusing something that has been demonstrated to work.
What if, for example, we found the "typhoid mary" for measles (someone who was asymptomatic, but carried the disease and spread it to others). They could be cured with the vaccine, but refuse to take it. Should the interest of the public health outweigh the individual right to refuse treatment in this case? If not, why should others perish? If so, then why not force vaccines on everyone? Where should the line be drawn?
Here in the US, we typically coerce vaccination by making it a prerequisite for public school (some states allow "personal" or "religious" exemptions, though). That way, people aren't "forced" to do it; life is just more unpleasant if they insist on skipping vaccines. Not sure if the UK has a similar system to encourage vaccination.
Bought a car a few years ago, and found this non-profit that had a great strategy:
http://www.checkbook.org/auto/CarBargains_Secrets.pdf
You can never know what the dealership is getting from the factory in terms of kickback, so it's next to impossible to negotiate a deal all by yourself. The sales rep is never going to lose money on the car (despite what they may tell you); they'll just walk away. So even when they cry and tell you you're keeping them from feeding their family just know that they're making enough to cover their expenses. Your best bet is to put your purchase out to bid to multiple dealerships and let them fight it out. We did this and saved $2500 off the "invoice" price that Consumer Reports said we should be "aiming for" to get a good deal.
Let me say it again: make them bid; it's the only way to keep them honest.
As a side bonus, you don't have to deal with crazy add-ons, haggling, or waiting for managers to "approve" your deal. You e-mail the dealerships, tell them what you want, and ask for their final, out-the-door, all-fees-included price. Pick the winning one, print out the e-mail so you have it in writing, and go to the dealership to pick up your car. If they try to add anything on, just point to your e-mail and invite them to throw it in for the included price you've already committed to (we got "free" floor mats and locking wheel nuts, probably because they didn't want to bother to take them off).
Note that you have to be willing to contact multiple dealers, wait for responses, and follow through. If you want to buy the brand-new 2014 model whatever, in hot pink, and you need it TODAY, then this isn't the strategy for you. If you're willing to be patient to save a couple grand, try it out.
You mean like Hawaii, which has a state-run education system (not town or local)?
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawai'i_Department_of_Education
We use Postini (now Google message security), and we turned on their SPF checks. Unfortunately, there are no knobs for this, so SPF pass is "good", SPF softfail is "bad", and SFP fail is "always quarantine, even if the address is whitelisted".
Despite some high-profile mail getting snagged by this, we educated our users and let them know that while we're more stringent with SPF than most places, it's not "our fault" that other people can't configure their domains correctly. After an initial spate of 10 or so messages where we had to call other IT departments to set them straight, it's more or less died down now and our users know how the problems get resolved.
We also created this page to send to the e-mail originator, so we didn't have to craft well-thought-out e-mail responses each time:
http://web.suffieldacademy.org/~jhealy/spf.html
All of this makes for a little more work for us, but it has cut down on spam. Also, it makes the internet a little better of a place as we slowly drag other domains into compliance by catching their mistakes. ;-)
Wow, I would love for you to cite a reference for this.
You too. I'm not sure exactly where I come down on the organic debate yet, as there doesn't seem to be convincing evidence for either side. Most of the "evidence" I've seen for organic farming is that it's "more natural" and "doesn't use chemicals". The organic movement plays into this by advertising their products as "free from potentially harmful synthetic pesticides", while happily omitting the fact that they use non-synthetic pesticides. Organic farms are allowed to use as much non-synthetic pesticide as they want, you know. Just because it's "natural" doesn't automatically make it safer. Don't believe me? Try ingesting some all-natural arsenic or ricin sometime.
That said, I'm not super-psyched for prophylactic use of antibiotics, factory farming, or over-use of pesticides (of any kind), so "conventional" farming is no utopia. However, organic farming has to prove that it's actually better (not just "more natural") to justify the added expense and higher land use that they require. If someone has a peer-reviewed study demonstrating that organic food is more nutritious (all they studies I've seen says it isn't), has fewer pesticides (not just fewer "chemicals"), or otherwise superior, I'd like to see them. I haven't been able to find much hard data on the subject either way, and most of what I have found all leads back to one or two small or flawed studies.
For now, I'm trying to buy local more than organic, so at least it's fresh and perhaps doesn't require as many preservatives or pesticides.
I have one of those radios. For some reason, the Feds explicitly did not broadcast the test over NOAA emergency bands. Found that out afterwords, while trying to figure out why I didn't hear it.
Don't forget the most important part: the host part of the IP address should be the element's atomic number (e.g., "Einsteinium" -> 192.168.0.99).
Even better, recent versions of rsync allow you to shoehorn all metadata into xattrs on files, so you can (for example) store Mac OS X metadata and ACLs on a linux box with no special file system setup. You can even store the files as an unprived user and have the real perms stored in xattrs as well.
IANAL, but it's not quite as black-and-white as "if not under arrest, get up and leave". Make sure you're always courteous, even when you KNOW you're right.
The ACLU has some hints about this:
http://www.aclu.org/FilesPDFs/dwb%20bust%20card7_04.pdf
I wonder if there's beer on the SUN...
Hawaii does this with their H-Power incinerator. It has a series of magnets to remove recyclable metals, and a series of filters to remove the most noxious substances. Yes, it does produce polution, but it's better to burn garbage than coal or oil. Also, it reduces landfill use, which is important in Hawaii, where land is at a premium.
I take care of about 500 macs (~450 laptop, ~50 desktop). We stick mainly with Apple's Imaging Services (especially with Mike Bombich's frontends) to install fresh machines.
I agree with other posters that just about any hard drive will do in this situation, especially given that everyone has an axe to grind about a particular manufacturer. FWIW, we've been having good luck with the LaCie drives of late (triple interface USB2/FW400/FW800), and they come in a variety of sizes, form factors, and speeds. We've had mixed results with Maxtor drives; the older revision all died with the click of death, though the newer ones are still going strong.
For on-the-go repairs, I like the bus-powered 2 1/2" drives. They're easy to carry, and don't require a power brick to go with them. Yeah, they're only 5400 RPM, but that's plenty fine for us. If you used compressed disk images and ASR (or Mike Bombich's NetRestore frontend), you get even better throughput since the computer will decompress on the fly. In this case, portability may be better than the increased spindle speed.
Also, if money really is no object, look into getting yourself a NetBoot server. If you do that, you don't even need a drive at all! Just hold down the "n" key on boot, and the machine will netboot to your restore image. From there, you can nuke & pave with the click of a button, and get back to doing real work (the machine will reboot itself when done). We use one here to image our lab machines, desktops, and laptops, and it really works great. Huge time-saver at the beginning of the year when we get new equipment. Obviously, this requires a decent core network if you don't want to slag the entire LAN, but if you've got a decent switched network this can work very well.
I'm not saying that it *isn't* Spotlight, but just about anything could be chewing up your battery. Widgets, indexing, screen savers, or even poor Engergy Saver settings. Have you checked to make sure that Spotlight is what's killing your battery?
0 808165343661
Several people have been complaining about a bug in Tiger and the 2005 Powerbooks that has to do with the trackpad:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=2005
It seems that the new tracking features eat up a lot of processor time (and thus, a lot of battery as well).
Again, I'm not dissing the Spotlight issue: it's definitely something to look at. But if you're still having trouble, you might check on other factors that can kill your battery life.
I am a man, not a number!
Signed, #6
I know you're lying, because number six is totally a chick.
So it looks pretty straight forward. If Apple says it can be done, chances are: (1) they've done it, (2) they've got documentation telling you how to do it, (3) it is possible.
I agree with (1) and (3), but (2) is nowhere close. Apple has done it, and it is possible, but the documentation is somewhat lacking. There are several gotchas to worry about (especially if you're doing stuff like roaming profiles on the windows boxes). If you read the Apple documentation, it makes it look like 30 minutes of work. In reality, a full integration like what the poster is looking for is several days of time...
Also, it should be noted that integrating windows with OD can only be done as an NT4-style domain; the OD server can't masquerade as an AD server. I think the submitter understands this, which is why they're trying to integrate a whole AD server into the Mac setup. Running the Mac for everything just won't work if you need true AD (which I assume they do).
Most of the OD/AD integration I've heard of has the OD taking orders from AD. This is mainly due to the fact that AD is proprietary crap that hasn't been reverse-engineered yet, so the easiest way to go is to slave off of it, rather than try to get MS to play nice with your open, standards-compliant system. Of course, this is exactly what MS wants (embrace and extend!), but until the Samba team gets enough donations to hack the AD protocols, that's probably the only option.
An agent (CSA) runs on all endpoints and checks them for AV, firewall, OS patches, etc. If it's clean, the switch or router let's them through to the main netowrk. If not, you get VLAN'd off to a remediation network, and once you are done there you are allowed on.
Not to sound like a sales guy, but Bradford Software has an appliance that's been doing this for over a year. It polls switches for clients, can perform port and VLAN management, and it does remediation scans. Best of all, it interoperates with most managed switching equipment from any vendor.
Also cool is the fact that it doesn't require software on the clients (I couldn't tell from your description if NAP requires this). The appliance scans the client machines with various penetration tools and automatically sends them to a remediation VLAN. Very helpful for rogue clients on the network.
They are going to have to move at a lot faster pace if they want to be a security company.
No kidding. I just got finished with a 4-month battle with Cisco to fix a bug that disabled access control lists in my core switch.
If that's how long it takes a security bug to get fixed, I don't want to know how long it takes features to get implemented...
I set up a centralized print server this year for my job. We have a collection of GCC Elite 12/600 and Apple LaserWriter 16/600 for most of our printers. Yeah, they're old, but they're frickin' TANKS and they run forever.
They're pretty well supported (LPD interface for network printing), though they have some bugs (international character sets, job name length, complex PS2 commands). Also, they're getting old, so they're slow(er), and low on memory.
We've started replacing them with the HP2420dn. I've only had them on the network for a few months, but no complaints as of yet. They talk IPP to our CUPS server beautifully, and the speed and print quality is fine for our needs. I don't know how well the parallel interface works on them (I only use ethernet), but for the moment, things are looking good.
The Java/OO vs Pascal/procedural is currently raging, both at the high school and college level. To be sure, there are advantages and disadvantages to each.
For more info, you should check out this ACM listserver posting on the subject, which the beginning of a long thread on this issue.
I don't think so. There are a lot simpler carrots and sticks available, in order of decreasing importance to the average teenage girl:
1) Telephone privs - no cell phone for you
...
While I'm sure there's some variance on this, I'd be willing to wager that IM has knocked out the phone as the most important thing. Sure, it's not the only thing, but judging from the kids at the school where I teach, IM is the major lifeline. After all, why talk with just one friend when you can "talk" with 20 at the same time?
Have you considered OpenBSD's Authpf? Here's the description and man page.
It runs on an OpenBSD firewall (which may be a pain for you; not sure what you've got installed already).
Anyway, what it does is it prevents packets from flowing UNLESS the user has authenticated to the firewall via an ssh session. From there, the packets are tagged as belonging to the user, and you can deal with a particular user's packets as you wish (prioritize, block, redirect, etc).
If you could apply standard login controls (amount of time, time of day, etc), then you can effectively limit access to the internet with the same granularity...
That should read:
;-)
Nuke the UNBORN Gay Whales for Jesus
(It would be nice to turn a couple of my DBs into a "single file with multiple tables", but hey, it works fine in multiple file mode, so like others say, why break it?)
Because the number of files is starting to get ridiculous. We use FM to store student records, grades, class schedules, team rosters, sports schedules, teacher names, pictures, parent information, and other sundry items. Relating all these things makes for a pretty crazy situation, especially with the "multiple file" joy.
Additionally, keeping track of each file (permissions, for example) is becoming a bit of a burden as well.
If you saw the sheer number of calculation fields we have that are going to be done away with using FM7... that's why we're looking to upgrade.
I'd like to think that I'm competent to replace the system. Let me put it this way: I'm competent enough to know how massive of an undertaking it would be. =)
I wouldn't be doing this just for the FOSS part of it; I have a legitimate need to open data access to other applications.
That said, that need pales in comparison to our need for a stable, easy-to-use system for the end-user. I'm mainly looking for suggestions (in case I missed some major product that could help me) so I can weigh alternatives (if any exist).
Believe me, I ain't going to touch this unless I have a strong feeling that it can be done correctly. Otherwise, it's back to TDV-dump-and export like I've been doing...