My major was Computer Engineering and I would recommend it or Computer Science to anyone interested in succeeding in IT. None of the IT programs I have seen or had employees enrolled in prepare you as thoroughly as the more technical majors. Most of my level 1 technicians have come from IT programs and it boggles me how often they are completely lost with basic ideas of computer operation.
Let me clarify a little. I don't work in programming (at least not regularly) the vast majority of our work is systems administration. The IT guys are missing so many of the fundamentals of computing that the higher level stuff is largely a mysterious black box. Understanding new technologies is largely memorization for them.
Try managing our supercomputing clusters without ever really grappling with kernel theory, shared memory usage or schedulers. What's the difference between traditional PBS scheduling vs Mosix type clustering? The CS and ECEn guys have often compiled kernel modules or written virtual memory simulators or any number of things that makes carrying those concepts over to supercomputing trivial.
Even simpler functions like wireless networking or Active Directory are aided by an in depth understanding of basic intercommunications when you've coded up your own TCP stack before or written your own security authentication handshakes.
IT degrees will need more maturity to develop into something besides being the "I want to earn a lot of money working with computers but I'm too lazy/dumb to earn a hard degree" in my eyes.
I may be a little different from the other posters, in that some people have to justify the use of linux desktops over Windows. In my case, we are a biotech research center and lots of apps needed by my users are Linux only. We also have lots that are PC only and a few groups that are mostly Mac users.
I wanted an environment that could be the IT dream hybrid. One infrastruture to rule them all!
Its not perfect but here's what were doing so far (this is all been done very recently so only time will tell if this is actually a good idea!)
Active Directory is our common login directory. Our file servers are mostly Windows. All Linux apps are on an NFS share from a Linux server. We have an Mac Xserv that is set to synchronize with the AD. Lin/Win clients are ghost imaged
The Windows clients of course are handling purely with AD
The linux clients are set to pseudo-windows mode with Winbind performing the login and pam_mount auto mapping salmba shares like the drives that they are used to getting on Windows (they get/home/smith/U mapped to the same place as their U drive in Windows) Printers are run through the Windows print server also. Apps come from the NFS share.
Mac clients authenticate to the Xserv natively and get their drive mappings through samba from the Xserv login script.
Now the last piece is app management. We are evaluation Zenworks for the Win/Lin environment and use the Apple Remote Desktop 2 for macs. However if Zen doesn't run easily (most of my staff consists of student employees, so we have to make helpdesk tools easy to use) we'll use pure AD or AD+SMS for windows and continue doing Linux updates through the RHN up2date tool (it is set to automatically install any updates we put in a certain nfs share) and new apps are put on the NFS application share.
Zenworks certainly has the potential to be this solution for lots of people, but the added complexity of keeping yet another directory (eDirectory) sync'd to the active directory (currently we have openLDAP and the Mac Xserv user directory sync'd to it) might be wearisome to many and for lots of people the cost of these products is highly prohibitive.
This is my solution and it may be silly for most people, heck in a few years I may think its silly for ME.
I strongly belive that the approach taken by Symantec and Altiris (and yes Zenworks too) of buying up seperate desktop management tools and lumping them all together in swiss army knife conglomeration simply isn't going to cut it. I think the need exists for a new rewritten product to manage Linux desktops (and ideally all the others depending on client software(ie a Win client, a Mac client, Palm, etc).
As important and useful as this would seem to be to IT admins, (maybe we're worried that too much desktop management automation will put us out of jobs...) I really wonder when something will step up to the plate and make such a product to remotely image, update, deploy packages and remote admin a variety of clients.
This is something I've pondered a lot lately and had to comment on. If it makes no sense to anyone else, Oh well.:)
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My major was Computer Engineering and I would recommend it or Computer Science to anyone interested in succeeding in IT. None of the IT programs I have seen or had employees enrolled in prepare you as thoroughly as the more technical majors. Most of my level 1 technicians have come from IT programs and it boggles me how often they are completely lost with basic ideas of computer operation. Let me clarify a little. I don't work in programming (at least not regularly) the vast majority of our work is systems administration. The IT guys are missing so many of the fundamentals of computing that the higher level stuff is largely a mysterious black box. Understanding new technologies is largely memorization for them. Try managing our supercomputing clusters without ever really grappling with kernel theory, shared memory usage or schedulers. What's the difference between traditional PBS scheduling vs Mosix type clustering? The CS and ECEn guys have often compiled kernel modules or written virtual memory simulators or any number of things that makes carrying those concepts over to supercomputing trivial. Even simpler functions like wireless networking or Active Directory are aided by an in depth understanding of basic intercommunications when you've coded up your own TCP stack before or written your own security authentication handshakes. IT degrees will need more maturity to develop into something besides being the "I want to earn a lot of money working with computers but I'm too lazy/dumb to earn a hard degree" in my eyes.
I may be a little different from the other posters, in that some people have to justify the use of linux desktops over Windows. In my case, we are a biotech research center and lots of apps needed by my users are Linux only. We also have lots that are PC only and a few groups that are mostly Mac users.
I wanted an environment that could be the IT dream hybrid. One infrastruture to rule them all!
Its not perfect but here's what were doing so far (this is all been done very recently so only time will tell if this is actually a good idea!)
Active Directory is our common login directory. Our file servers are mostly Windows. All Linux apps are on an NFS share from a Linux server. We have an Mac Xserv that is set to synchronize with the AD. Lin/Win clients are ghost imaged
The Windows clients of course are handling purely with AD
The linux clients are set to pseudo-windows mode with Winbind performing the login and pam_mount auto mapping salmba shares like the drives that they are used to getting on Windows (they get /home/smith/U mapped to the same place as their U drive in Windows) Printers are run through the Windows print server also. Apps come from the NFS share.
Mac clients authenticate to the Xserv natively and get their drive mappings through samba from the Xserv login script.
Now the last piece is app management. We are evaluation Zenworks for the Win/Lin environment and use the Apple Remote Desktop 2 for macs. However if Zen doesn't run easily (most of my staff consists of student employees, so we have to make helpdesk tools easy to use) we'll use pure AD or AD+SMS for windows and continue doing Linux updates through the RHN up2date tool (it is set to automatically install any updates we put in a certain nfs share) and new apps are put on the NFS application share.
Zenworks certainly has the potential to be this solution for lots of people, but the added complexity of keeping yet another directory (eDirectory) sync'd to the active directory (currently we have openLDAP and the Mac Xserv user directory sync'd to it) might be wearisome to many and for lots of people the cost of these products is highly prohibitive.
This is my solution and it may be silly for most people, heck in a few years I may think its silly for ME.
I strongly belive that the approach taken by Symantec and Altiris (and yes Zenworks too) of buying up seperate desktop management tools and lumping them all together in swiss army knife conglomeration simply isn't going to cut it. I think the need exists for a new rewritten product to manage Linux desktops (and ideally all the others depending on client software(ie a Win client, a Mac client, Palm, etc).
As important and useful as this would seem to be to IT admins, (maybe we're worried that too much desktop management automation will put us out of jobs...) I really wonder when something will step up to the plate and make such a product to remotely image, update, deploy packages and remote admin a variety of clients.
This is something I've pondered a lot lately and had to comment on. If it makes no sense to anyone else, Oh well. :)