Completely OT - bedtime for children

[dennis]

8<

That should tell you about how difficult it is to administer windows and something about how much it costs compared to linux.

IME linux systems are installed by enthusiasts working with windows systems. They then administer it for a while, get bored, leave (1) and then the organisation is left looking for someone to administer the system who can understand all the scripts, etc. the last guy has written but not documented. Then they are in real trouble as they can't afford to pay a premium so the whole thing just degenerates into a mess when they don't employ someone suitable.

With windows, they get their course notes out and do what they were trained to do.

1: I know this happens because I put in Unix systems and wrote the scripts and then went on to do something else and I was getting calls months later even though I did document the scripts. It wasn't until they got a new admin guy that could also write scripts that they did their own changes to suit their new practices that the calls stopped.

[Frank Erskine]

What's that got to do with bedtime for children? :-)

[Dave Liquorice]

Our Primary school has to pay for IT support, it hasn't the money to do so.

The secondary school is without their IT support person and has been since early in the year. Some one at the school is keeping the system running on a "fire fighting" basis but nothing is being done with the VLE or web site.

[Dave Liquorice]

Would love to have the abilty to *try* one of those services.

Tesco don't deliver to our postcode (but do to the town 2 miles and 2 minutes) down the road. When queried it's beacuse they can't guarantee the time slot, eh they work to that tight a tolerance? Get stuck behind a tractor on the 30 mile trip from the store and they'll miss the time slot... Oh and they have just sent me a voucher for =A37.50 off my first online grocery shop...

The nearest Sainsburys is 50 miles away, I think.

Ocado don't deliver here, will have to check Waitrose Direct, the nearest Waitrose is only 20 miles away.

The only grocery supermarket that I know delivers here is Asda. Anyone experience of them?

[Huge]

At my PoE we have quite a lot of everything (Unix, Linux, Mainframe, AS/400, Windows, whatever). What I find weird is that each platform has a dedicated support team who know nothing about any of the other platforms. Given how many systems are multi-platform, I find this odd. And disturbing.

[Huge]

Hear, hear.

[Mark]

What do you teach?

[Mark]

Not the delivery service. I once went into an Asda store and the vegetables were so poor I didn't buy anything and never went back.

[Mark]

LO.

[Mark]

XP is totally unsuitable for a security or safety critical application.

[Mark]

I wish I could get my kids interested. All they want to do is use computers.

[Tim Watts]

As usual, you miss the point completely Dennis.

They get their MSCE notes out, do their stuff. Then I walk in an say to the DNS guy "can you fix me a CNAME record from blah to blah" and they look blank. You then ask "why does putting a redirect rule in Exchange cause all the To: headers including message and envelope to be lost and replaced by the single redirect address?". More blank looks. They get a bit of software in that comes up with a stupid message at the top which is erroneous and needs clicking a close button to get rid of it: "we are working with the vendor to get rid of that". 3 months later it's still there.

They know their little world but many do not have any real broad understanding of systems, networks and protocols. And more often than not, they are powerless to fix stuff even if they do have a clue.

Big well known investment bank in London - >50000 RHEL linux server worldwide. Stock Exchange - linux. My department: 115 Debian Linux servers. My last university dept - about 100 Centos linux servers. Previous uni dept:

How many more do you want?

Spurious argument - same applies to Windows, Mac, anything else.

As above.

So they failed to employ someone with the correct skillset and/or train them?

[Tim Watts]

Our school is stuck with a POS VLE (school portal). It is broken in it's design in so many ways and if you want to cry, point W3C checkers at it.

I would love to run something for them - but I resist, inline with Dennis's better points: I'm am already oversubscribed with jobs - and I don't want to leave them with something that no-one can fix.

Sadly, that leaves them with something that "works" for a very crap definition of working.

In this case, it's the idiots in the Council who don't know what they are doing.

[Tim Watts]

If your groceries don't arrive, the kids don't eat. Every tried getting hungry children to sleep? ;->>>

Has anyone said "angle grinder" yet?

[Mark]

IME only large schools can afford to employ in-house IT support personnel. These jobs are still very low paid so they are unlikely to attract anyone decent. A lot of school web sites are neglected. I would say something but that would be tantamount to volunteering and I don't have the time.

Our primary schools contract out IT support but the conditions imposed by the contractors[*] are very specific and I'm sure that Linux would not be covered.

Going back to document formats you need to educate /every/ single member of staff not to send out proprietary formats and most of them would not understand what you are talking about. BTDTGTTS.

My son was recently sent out a homework in docx format. Neither OO or LO could open it properly and we don't have a recent version of M$ Office. The teacher who sent it was a head of department!

[*] Because they go for a cheap solution.

[Tim Watts]

Give them an incentive: here's a box with a blank hard disk. Here are the CDs. Get on with it...

I've got Xubuntu nicely integrated with my systems now - and very snappy it is too, on 6 year old hardware.

Daughter's first job will be to customise her own desktop - I shall need pictures of fluffy bunnies...

:)

[Tim Watts]

I was just suggesting sticking with it until LO fix whatever they've broken for you...

[Mark]

There's the rub. You really need a committed member of staff to do this, otherwise windows will be the "only" solution.

But Linux is not all plain sailing. I have many issues with Linux that take a lot of time to sort out. I am currently trying to hook up my phone to Linux, which does not seem to work (Samsung Galaxy S).

[Huge]

So you send it back with a request to have it resent in an open format. Why should the problem fall on your shoulders?

[Paul Herber]

Your request will get "lost" or ignored.