[GLLUG] My Tech Suggestions

[Clay Dowling]

It's certainly a noble attempt.  I might recommend the following approach:

Dear Sirs,

Your current network is good, but I believe that with some care you can do
even more with your current budget.  I am a member of the Greater Lansing
Linux User's group.  If you come to one of our 6:30pm meetings on Thursday
evenings at 1800 N. Grand River in Lansing, people there, including other
high school network administrators, can show you how to stretch your
budget and improve network security.


In fact, that is so good that I think I'll send it to the Flushing
schools, since we're trying to get up a in Flint.

Clay




Steven Sayers wrote:
> [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
>
> _______________________________________________
> linux-user mailing list
> linux-user at egr.msu.edu
> http://mailman.egr.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/linux-user
>


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