[GLLUG] My Tech Suggestions

Steven Sayers sjsayers93 at gmail.com
Wed Sep 26 15:50:09 EDT 2007


[I sent this to the IT guys at my school, what do you think about it]
I've thought of some ways to stretch your budget when it comes to
technology. 

On Servers :
Firstly you have about 10 hard drives I can imagine all using differnt
ammounts of space. Such as your apps data hard drive contains 50 gb's of
"Stuff" and yet has 350 gigs or so left. Let's assume that is true on
most of your hard drives. Well why not buy a Raid card and plug all your
hard drives into there and then you would have a seamless terrabyte. 

Nextly you should have some form of GNU/Linux on your servers because at
the current point they aren't to well jailed. The permissions would
allow people to do currently malicious things even if you do have
backups. Other reasons you should use linux on your server is because it
is much more secure and adaptable. I believe you have NTFS partitions on
your hard drives at the moment which means fragmentation now if you were
to change to lets say EXT3 that would prevent fragmentation since it is
a modern file system. 

Thirdly you have a soft web block. Meaning if I used a live cd of some
Linux distrubution I could get around your web filter. I understand the
need to block some sites since they do not pretain to School, however
you might want to redirect all trafic through a thin server and have it
close requests to certian sites. 

A huge addition that comes with linux is user managment. Currently you
seem to have to make new users every few years and clear out the
directorys. Well I'm sure that is a pain. With linux and it's stabilty
( some servers have been up for years with out a single crash, example
being nasa mars rovers ) you could keep the current users and restrict
the Directory access to X ammount of space on the data drive meaning
less work to clean it out. 

MONEY : Linux saves money. It's as simple as that. Here are a few
reasons why ; It's open source meaning you or anyone could freely
recieve the source code and modify it to your needs and the community is
constantly making updates. Look at KDE and you will see how fast and
steady their updates are. Also stabilty and hastle; Yes linux will take
time to setup, but even in the short run it is easier, no need for
calling support since the Linux community support is amazing. There are
many means of contcting the developers of programs.

On the desktop : 
These machines in our school are fine, sure the ram is a bit low at 256
mb but linux doesnt care, you could run Gnome on these machines
wonderfuly. Open source software has free updates, Look at open-office a
well far along office application and compared to our current version of
Microsoft Office it is a big update.

It's a bit harder to explain the desktop, it's something you need to try
your self. You could find an easy linux distrobution at www.ubuntu.org



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