[SLE] Server success in Windows environment

From: Paul W. Abrahams (abrahams_at_acm.org)
Date: 10/13/04

  • Next message: Leendert Meyer: "Re: [SLE] strange problem with SuSE 9.1 and networking" 
    To: suse-linux-e@suse.com
Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2004 15:42:04 -0400

    Unlike most posts here, and just about all of mine, this isn't a request for
    help (except peripherally); it's a report on something I got to work that
    folks might find interesting.

    I'm working as the volunteer IT person in my town's municipal office. I first
    got involved in that by getting everyone onto a Comcast broadband Internet
    connection. Of course, the working environment was 100% Windows. However,
    one of the town's wishlist items was a "server", whatever that meant. My
    obvious question: if it's a server, what is it serving?

    Anyway, it turned out that the main function people were looking for was
    backup. So I set up a box for them (total cost well under $500) running (of
    course) SuSE Linux 9.1, with the promise that it would look to all of them
    like just another Windows machine (thanks to Samba, of course). And indeed
    it does! Furthermore, using a crontab, a shell script, and setting the
    Windows permissions properly (that was the hardest part), I've arranged
    things so that the backup is fully automatic; the Linux box simply runs
    around the office several times a day collecting the folders to be backed up,
    and no one has to do anything or even notices that the backup is happening.
    More precisely, it does a backup of everything it can find at 9 am and then
    every two hours after that it collects the files it hasn't gotten earlier
    during the day because machines were turned off or otherwise inaccessible.

    Of course I'd dearly love to boot Windows from the office altogether, but I
    have to be honest about it: if the users perceive a loss of functionality or
    performance, or find the interface hard to use, they won't accept it. And
    everyone is running some version of MS Office, of course.

    I see two alternatives for introducing Linux but no way to make either of them
    acceptable. I could install OpenOffice, but I can't honestly make the case
    that it does everything that Office does and does it as well, without any
    extra complications. Or I could install Wine (or whatever its
    semicommercial version is these days) and stick with MS Office, but the
    performance hit would probably be unacceptable and I have my doubts about the
    stability also.

    I'd be interested in ideas on how to sell Linux in this environment, but I
    have to be honest about it, and the office staff, unlike me, has little
    inherent reason to make the change and a big reason (the learning curve) not
    to.

    Paul Abrahams 

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