[plug] [contains rant] Linux in schools (was: public company?)

Leon Brooks leon at brooks.smileys.net
Mon Sep 18 09:19:37 WST 2000


Brian Tombleson wrote:
> This would mean cost of ownership of SO/Linux/Open-source/Free-software will
> drop to $0 along with MS stock price, right?

TCO is never zero; the attraction for a school would be real security and real
stability. That combined with vastly reduced problems with standards (e.g. not
having Active Directory around to mess with your DNS) and freely available
development tools for the ComSci(upper-schools)/Science(high-school) students
would be heaven on a stick for most dedicated educational admins.

I hate to say this, since it could offend some people, but it must needs be
said: a lot of school admins are very bad at their jobs. Many of them are
co-opted teachers with no deep understanding of computer basics, and it's hard
to explain to them that while their systems look all right, there's a copy of
Back Orifice, 7th Sphere or NetBus on practically every machine and privacy
there is a myth.

Where Linux would help out here is by being deliverable secure (OpenWall kernel
patches etc), and remotely maintainable even on the budget internet links that
most schools use. This would make it more practical to outsource administration
to someone who actually understands what they're doing, so the co-opted science
teacher can be released to return to doing what they were really trained for and
the school can have some bona-fide reliability and security out of their
network.

I find that business clients are extremely happy to pay me $1000 to set up a
server if it saves them $5000 in MS licencing fees plus $2-5000 in staff time
not lost to crashes every year. It works like this: server dies from acute email
infestation, takes 3 hours to repair, meanwhile 30 out of 50 staff twiddle their
thumbs at $20/hour == $1800 for one outage, plus frustration, plus maybe lost
business; server dies for a day...?

<RANT>Businesses go from happy to delighted if I can do gateway/firewall, file,
database, web, name and email services on the one box for $2000 plus hardware.
Contrast this with $2000 for a Cisco, plus at least two NT or 2000 licences,
plus maybe bananoid per-CPU licences for their website, plus Exchange, plus
setup fees anyway, who knows what else? You might require: 1 box for MS-SQL,
another for Exchange, and another for the other services - or to be safe, one
for web and one for DNS/proxy. There may be another router or two for further
inter-MS-box firewalling - and none of these NT/2000 boxes are likely to be
off-the-shelf stuff! No sir-ree! We're talking Hardware Compatibility List gear
and near double the price here! One site I know of, to do their stuff with MS
software, would require a minimum of four HCL boxes at $5000++ each, plus four
NT/2000 licences, plus an MS-SQL licence (they have this already and are
regretting it), plus Exchange, plus an internet connector licence ($2500 per CPU
and the SQL box has 2 CPUs), plus an additional router to add to their existing
two, plus setup costs... say $30,000 to $35,000, without any form of
clustering/failover, plus regular reboots - in which they are most uninterested
- in place of about $4000 for a reliable system, or about $7000 with instant,
automatic failover to a duplicate box. Which would *you* choose?

Making the case for workstations is harder in up-front financial terms, since a
workstation doesn't cost that much less to set up than a server - but it can
still be done. The big win in workstations is that the staff cannot run ILOVEYOU
viruses or even attachments that merely sound a klaxon, flash the screen pink
and put the words "I'M GAY" across it. Even if a staff member figures out how to
run such things on Linux, the most they can destroy is their own user context.
Now consider Windows, where the little man flyng around your screen (propelled
by the rocket flame spraying from his sitting gear and accompanied by
suitable(?) noises) might also be putting your network card into promiscuous
mode or shipping your address and .pwl files back to its author - or running
your hard disk heads into the spindle.

I see three Internet cafes, who shall run nameless. One runs Linux on 9 boxes
but does it on really cheap hardware. About half the time, one box or another
will be unreliable. About 10% of the time, one box or another will be useless
due to hardware failure. Except for disk crashes or corruption due to dying
hardware, these boxes do not require a reinstall (might average one box per nine
months). The other cafes each run Windows on three boxes. Not only do these
boxes require reinstallation regularly (more often than monthly per box), but if
the owner is away the typical working population is one box, and if the owner is
present, two. The two Windows-based cafes are remarkably similar in this
respect, except that one connects to the inernet through a LAN and Linux box and
the other has three modems. In terms of abuse, a school is not much different to
an internet cafe.

If the 9-seat cafe were to run at the same speed as the others, you might think
that they would be doing a reinstall every three days and have three to six
boxes offline at any given instant. In practice it would be much worse, since
one virussed machine could wipe the lot. Yes, I know there are virus scanners,
and both Windows cafes use them. I suppose it helps, and wonder how they'd get
along without them. Now, think of a school as being a 30- to 300- seat internet
cafe... can you see why having Linux workstations might be attractive to
them?</RANT>

For these reasons, the Linux business is booming. Expect heartless opportunists
to swarm onto the field soon.

-- 
The real problem isn't whether machines think but whether people do.
    -- B.F. Skinner



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