OK, now that you've all had a chance to post your totally unfounded opinions of the ethics and intelligence of those of us who happen to ply our common trade in schools, can someone who's actually done the work weigh in?
For the past 6 months I have been the network administrator of three schools which share a common campus. Between the three schools, there are 450 or so PCs, and we just this week added a second IT person, because we've ordered another hundred machines, and 550 is just a bit too much for one person to handle, and still keep tech support response time to same-day. Prior to this, the entire IT department of this campus consisted of me. I did the network administration, tne end user support, the applications development, integration, training, hardware troubleshooting and repair, the works.
At the last job I held, for a non-profit corporation, we had a IT staff of three for 180
PCs doing much the same spectrum of tasks. If this shows you nothing else, I hope you uderstand that school IT budgets, compared to industry, are quite lean, at least around this region. We're always looking for ways to make our IT dollars go further, so believe me, if I thought there was a free or open source alternative that offered more value than a Microsoft one, I would certainly propose that we begin using it.
Our network runs a mix of systems. There are 50 Macs or so, and all but one of the rest of the desktops run various flavors of Windows, from 95 up to XP. One desktop machine, one, runs Linux (happens to be Mandrake, because it's easy to set up and does what I want. I tried Debian, but until very recently, trying to get the version of CUPS that came with Debian to print to SMB printers was virtually impossible. Fortunately, there has been some good work recently on the testing distro.) I installed that one machine in the senior's lounge just to see if they'd use it. So far, they stick to the Windows machines and the one Mac in there.
There are wonderful open source programs out there that I use virtually every day. I use Putty to log in to our linux web servers. I'll install the Gimp on this latest batch of laptops we're buying, because I don't have the funding to get Photoshop Elements licenses for them, and the choice is that, or no image editing software at all. I use FreeZip when I need to put a zip/unzip program on pre XP machines. But am I about to suggest we replace Windows with Linux desktops, Office with OpenOffice, or IE with Firefox? No way, at least not yet. Why? Lots of reasons. Here are some of them.
Linux Desktops vs Windows: most of the kids have Windows at home, so it's a lot easier on them if the machines here use the same OS. Of course, our job isn't always to make their life easier, it's to educate them, so it could be argued we should expose them to another OS just so they will have to think about what an OS is really about, instead of just using one all the time, but that argument really doesn't hold much water with the language arts and social studies teachers, who don't care how much, or little, the kids understand about the computers they are using, they just want them to be able to do their research, mostly on the 'net, and write papers and prepare presentations.
Another point: I support machines as much as
8-10 years old now, pentium 133s with 32 meg of RAM running windows 95. (So much for the bloated budgets of bureaucracy some/. readers seem to think exist, huh?) We can hardly run Linux/OpenOffice on these, now, can we? so running Linux on some machines would require the kids to use one GUI on some machines, and another on others, and require me, the sysadmin, to worry about how to integrate all these into one seamless, easy to use and maintain, network infrastructure. Believe me, if I had the time, I would enjoy the challenge. But I simply don't have the time. If I were putting together a network from scratch, I might be tempted to avoid using Windows at all, to avoid headaches like virus threats that are the bane of any Windows network adm
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OK, now that you've all had a chance to post your totally unfounded opinions of the ethics and intelligence of those of us who happen to ply our common trade in schools, can someone who's actually done the work weigh in? For the past 6 months I have been the network administrator of three schools which share a common campus. Between the three schools, there are 450 or so PCs, and we just this week added a second IT person, because we've ordered another hundred machines, and 550 is just a bit too much for one person to handle, and still keep tech support response time to same-day. Prior to this, the entire IT department of this campus consisted of me. I did the network administration, tne end user support, the applications development, integration, training, hardware troubleshooting and repair, the works. At the last job I held, for a non-profit corporation, we had a IT staff of three for 180 PCs doing much the same spectrum of tasks. If this shows you nothing else, I hope you uderstand that school IT budgets, compared to industry, are quite lean, at least around this region. We're always looking for ways to make our IT dollars go further, so believe me, if I thought there was a free or open source alternative that offered more value than a Microsoft one, I would certainly propose that we begin using it. Our network runs a mix of systems. There are 50 Macs or so, and all but one of the rest of the desktops run various flavors of Windows, from 95 up to XP. One desktop machine, one, runs Linux (happens to be Mandrake, because it's easy to set up and does what I want. I tried Debian, but until very recently, trying to get the version of CUPS that came with Debian to print to SMB printers was virtually impossible. Fortunately, there has been some good work recently on the testing distro.) I installed that one machine in the senior's lounge just to see if they'd use it. So far, they stick to the Windows machines and the one Mac in there. There are wonderful open source programs out there that I use virtually every day. I use Putty to log in to our linux web servers. I'll install the Gimp on this latest batch of laptops we're buying, because I don't have the funding to get Photoshop Elements licenses for them, and the choice is that, or no image editing software at all. I use FreeZip when I need to put a zip/unzip program on pre XP machines. But am I about to suggest we replace Windows with Linux desktops, Office with OpenOffice, or IE with Firefox? No way, at least not yet. Why? Lots of reasons. Here are some of them. Linux Desktops vs Windows: most of the kids have Windows at home, so it's a lot easier on them if the machines here use the same OS. Of course, our job isn't always to make their life easier, it's to educate them, so it could be argued we should expose them to another OS just so they will have to think about what an OS is really about, instead of just using one all the time, but that argument really doesn't hold much water with the language arts and social studies teachers, who don't care how much, or little, the kids understand about the computers they are using, they just want them to be able to do their research, mostly on the 'net, and write papers and prepare presentations. Another point: I support machines as much as 8-10 years old now, pentium 133s with 32 meg of RAM running windows 95. (So much for the bloated budgets of bureaucracy some /. readers seem to think exist, huh?) We can hardly run Linux/OpenOffice on these, now, can we? so running Linux on some machines would require the kids to use one GUI on some machines, and another on others, and require me, the sysadmin, to worry about how to integrate all these into one seamless, easy to use and maintain, network infrastructure. Believe me, if I had the time, I would enjoy the challenge. But I simply don't have the time. If I were putting together a network from scratch, I might be tempted to avoid using Windows at all, to avoid headaches like virus threats that are the bane of any Windows network adm