One reason why Microsoft may very well come out on top in the long run is that there is no spiritual competitive mind to Linux. Not that it is necessarily a bad thing, but it limits its competiveness. It wins on price point, but if you think that a Redhat or a SuSE can compete with the sales force of Microsoft, you have another thing coming to you. IBM is a possibility, but they really are selling hardware in the end, and people who don't use them are wary to get tied into expensive IBM solutions.
Microsoft has very motivated people pushing their unproven solutions on very gullible company executives who don't know anything about the effort of a migration from Unix to Windows. Linux has no one credible force going out there and explaining it. Hopefully, one of these distribution companies can rise to the occassion and compete head to head with Microsoft and win on the merit of the technology and not on the prettiest graph. Heck maybe we could through in a pretty graph here and there:)
That olive crown is the best part of the article. Long live the Caesar!!!
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If any of you guys have Cisco switchs then you can use Vlan Management Policy Server. It allows you to assign students to vlans based on mac addresses. I designed a system built around this switching feature.
When a student plugs into a dorm port, the first packet they send triggers the switch to look up their mac address in a central database. Barring an entry they are dumped into a fallback VLAN where I position a DHCP, DNS, HTTP multihomed server. The DHCP assigns them a non-routable IP address to communicate with one side of the box. I then instruct them(through check-in documentation) to open their browser.
I wrote a tricked out named.conf, that no matter what domain they request, it always returns the IP of my server. Thus, they will connect to my server and I can collect information, including their Mac address from the arp cache...they fill out the form and their data is dumped into a database, a perl script is called to add their mac address and vlan assignment to the VMPS database(a flat text file) and fire out a SNMP packet out the public interface to tell the VMPS switch to grab the VMPS file and refresh it's tables.
Viola! Totally automatic...we were having trouble keeping up with the volume of activations, so I had to think of something(there are 3 of us for 3500 ports, and 2 are student aides).
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One reason why Microsoft may very well come out on top in the long run is that there is no spiritual competitive mind to Linux. Not that it is necessarily a bad thing, but it limits its competiveness. It wins on price point, but if you think that a Redhat or a SuSE can compete with the sales force of Microsoft, you have another thing coming to you. IBM is a possibility, but they really are selling hardware in the end, and people who don't use them are wary to get tied into expensive IBM solutions.
:)
Microsoft has very motivated people pushing their unproven solutions on very gullible company executives who don't know anything about the effort of a migration from Unix to Windows. Linux has no one credible force going out there and explaining it. Hopefully, one of these distribution companies can rise to the occassion and compete head to head with Microsoft and win on the merit of the technology and not on the prettiest graph. Heck maybe we could through in a pretty graph here and there
That olive crown is the best part of the article. Long live the Caesar!!!
If any of you guys have Cisco switchs then you can use Vlan Management Policy Server. It allows you to assign students to vlans based on mac addresses. I designed a system built around this switching feature. When a student plugs into a dorm port, the first packet they send triggers the switch to look up their mac address in a central database. Barring an entry they are dumped into a fallback VLAN where I position a DHCP, DNS, HTTP multihomed server. The DHCP assigns them a non-routable IP address to communicate with one side of the box. I then instruct them(through check-in documentation) to open their browser. I wrote a tricked out named.conf, that no matter what domain they request, it always returns the IP of my server. Thus, they will connect to my server and I can collect information, including their Mac address from the arp cache...they fill out the form and their data is dumped into a database, a perl script is called to add their mac address and vlan assignment to the VMPS database(a flat text file) and fire out a SNMP packet out the public interface to tell the VMPS switch to grab the VMPS file and refresh it's tables. Viola! Totally automatic...we were having trouble keeping up with the volume of activations, so I had to think of something(there are 3 of us for 3500 ports, and 2 are student aides).