Re: My local Linux advocacy efforts

[Bill Tihen <bill@tasis.ch>]

In the server area I am not too worried about NT taking over schools.  

1) Cost reasons -- Five years ago (maybe 6) I arrived at a school and they
had bought a brand new NT server.  Unfortunately with Win NT 3.51 & later
with Win NT 4.0, there was odd behavior with the mac file sharing, the MS
email bridge to Internet mail cost $10,000 -- a year later they offered me
a special deal at $5,000.  I had to pay additional liscences for additional
users.  NT Servers is just not cost effective for schools -- in my oppinion.

2) Affordable tech support -- I also couldn't find anyone to help me for
free back then.  All my university friends and people on the Internet and
other SysAdmins I knew however, where more than willing to help me with
FreeBSD & Linux.  As well as BSDI -- BSDI is actually quite a good starting
point for schools because the price is reasonable and the telephone tech
support in the states is good and is also reasonable.  $500 for unlimited
help and updates.  MS NT support was $1,500 for 10 questions and that was
the minimum and I couldn't find anyone who could help me for free.  Another
good option is MachTen.  $300 dollars to buy for a school and $150 dollars
for unlimited tech support.  However it does not have real protected memory
and it doesn't have all the software available (netatalk is just now being
ported).  But its a good Unix learning environment.  In anycase, now I use
Linux, because the price is right and there is no end to the support I can
get.  I have a choice of friends, distributers (I find SuSE particularly
good), Internet, and paid support -- although I have not tried this so I
don't know how good the different companies are.  

3) Capabilities -- As far as I know Linux can do nearly everything a NT
server can do -- except it doesn't have the same screen as NT.  And it
usually does things better than NT.  And for a lot less money.  This always
makes people happy at schools.  Another Huge benifit for a school is there
are millions of compilers available for free on Linux.  On other platforms
one has to pay a lot of money to have access to them.  (Although linux
could use a good IDE with a debugger built in).  This is the only complaint
I get -- but no one complains about the price.

4) Free firewalling -- The first network I built didn't have any secret
information on it and I was given a class C -- I didn't even ask I just got
it.  Now all I can get is about 6 or so easily and then I have to IP
masquerading.  Linux does this for free and it is well maintained.  NT it
costs.

5) Stability -- I have had one crash in 5 years (actually the HD got
corrupted and I had to shut it down and restart in single user mode and 10
minutes later we were humming along again -- with only a few complaints of
lost data).  I have had to restart some services on occasion though.  Maybe
once a year.  This is however, better than anyother other platform I have
used except BSDI, it hasn't had any crashes.  

6) Hardware Compatibility -- With a little research it is possible to get
nearly any type of device working with Linux.  FreeBSD is also very good
but it doesn't support the wide variety of hardware that Linux does so
again Linux wins.  Of course nearly every thing works with NT, but even
there you have to be careful that the drivers are appropriate.  So I don't
even see a huge benifit in this area either.

Maybe you can write a advocacy note Doug.  If you agree with any of these
posts.

Bill  


I agree that the reason we exist is to bring NT to a competive scholastic
workstation as well as the most cost effective server platform.