Managing costs and moving to *nix

[dwhyte85]

Our ICT specialist is moving into a different subject area.

 

We have that sort of with our year 7s and soon to be year 8s, an integrated curriculum - no actual ICT lessons but a mixmatch, you do your ICT in Science lesson when documenting in Excel - type thingy.

[powdarrmonkey]

An other option would be to ditch the Citrix/ thin client side altogether and use virtual box or similar to run a virutal machine on those desktops that need access to sims. You'd need machine with enough ram and also you'd have to update those vms manually though

 

You don't have this option on non-VMX processors, at least in my small-scale experiments. Chances are this is most of the machines in a school, especially if they are more than a year or so old.

[steveg]

Is there not a half - way solution to this? We buy all of our MS through the LEA, which is a one off cost. We dont run the latest versions of everything (currently still office 2003 for example, although moving to 2007 soon) but there are no annual costs. If you just purchase the OS licences this year (we pay about £35 ish a copy, and £80 for the servers), then remove MS office and install open office. Total cost will be around £12k this year, and then zero in any subsequent years. If you factor in the time of re-building the whole network from scratch, and re-training all staff then this might be worth it?

 

Steve

[SteveBentley]

We have that sort of with our year 7s and soon to be year 8s, an integrated curriculum - no actual ICT lessons but a mixmatch, you do your ICT in Science lesson when documenting in Excel - type thingy.

 

That's how it was 20 years ago when I was in year 7 (I feel old now!) although there wasn't an IT GCSE at the end of it for us.

[DrCheese]

Is there not a half - way solution to this? We buy all of our MS through the LEA, which is a one off cost. We dont run the latest versions of everything (currently still office 2003 for example, although moving to 2007 soon) but there are no annual costs. If you just purchase the OS licences this year (we pay about £35 ish a copy, and £80 for the servers), then remove MS office and install open office. Total cost will be around £12k this year, and then zero in any subsequent years. If you factor in the time of re-building the whole network from scratch, and re-training all staff then this might be worth it?

 

Steve

That's actually not a bad idea, especially if you don't intend to change OS/office version for years. May end up costing more long term if you do change but you won't be spending that money during the belt tightening years ahead. You can always switch back when it's sunny days again. I think this something you should seriously look at putting to the bursar.

 

Another thing to consider is that if BSF does still take place, any managed company that comes is likely to throw away any Linux system you install and put in place a Windows system again, which is even more disruption for staff/students

 

If you are deadset on it then for the server side you can do..

 

Proxy - Smoothwall is also a yearly license as far as I know, so you'd still be paying for that But it is pretty easy to make a Linux proxy that does AD Auth using Dansguardian (which smoothwall is based on) for free, so you could look at that to replace your ISA server. This is how we do it here.

Email - Zimbra instead of exchange.

File sharing - can be done via Samba, we had all of our student/staff data on a Samba server a few years ago but dropped it because it was more of a pain than it was worth, but it wasn't to difficult to setup. YMMV

Edited June 10, 2010 by DrCheese
not really needed

[witch]

Moved thread as requested to *nix forum

[superfletch]

LZ, I respect your opinion as your posts are always so considered, indeed you have helped me before now, however to be blatant, there is a reason MS is so successful:

 

Swap your headteachers windows laptop for an ubuntu one for a fortnight.

 

Problem solved.

[localzuk]

LZ, I respect your opinion as your posts are always so considered, indeed you have helped me before now, however to be blatant, there is a reason MS is so successful:

 

Swap your headteachers windows laptop for an ubuntu one for a fortnight.

 

Problem solved.

 

We're starting smaller than that - we're swapping our ICT co-ordinator's laptop with an Ubuntu one for a fortnight.

 

So far, I have found free alternatives to most programs she uses, and installed a XenApp client for SIMS.net etc...

 

Also, I disagree as to the inferred reason that MS are so successful though...

[SYNACK]

This is a little old but should have lots of information on it especially as it is one of the strongholds of OOS zealotry Slashdot | Best FOSS Active Directory Alternative?

 

Here are some more:

Slashdot Technology Story | Windows Server Trusts Samba4 Active Directory - to replicate existing stuff off AD

Linux.com :: Windows to Linux Migration Guide

Slashdot | Samba Success in the Enterprise?

Slashdot | Linux Desktop Deployment Postmortems? - desktop deployment

Slashdot | Directory Service Implementation From Scratch?

 

There are usually some suprisingly useful comments on the slashdot stories.

 

There is also this http://theopensourceschool.blogspot.com/ from a school near here that has gone open source.

 

This lot also went open source + apple but I would not use them for a model as everything that I have heard apart from their press releases has been negitive http://mhp.school.nz/

Edited June 11, 2010 by SYNACK

[Teth]

I know it's not the opinion your looking for but I'm going to be another voice for finding the money or cutting your license bill I'll explain my background and why.

 

Background: I'm the senior of 2 IT techs at a 1,200 pupil grammar school. We run a network a little larger than yours 360 desktops and 140ish laptop 80 of which are set up to roam in and out of school as teacher laptops. We have flirted with the idea of going open source but have remained a hybrid site.

 

2x Win2k3 R2 DCs

Win2k3 R2 print and WSUS server

Win2k3 R2 Sims server

Linux firewall / proxy / filter

Linux web server

Linux file server

Linux NAS backups.

 

Laptop clients are windows XP, Desktops are winXP locally installed with an ubuntu network boot option.

 

We buy our licenses outright when we buy machines. Many say this is more expensive in the longrun which would be true if you paid for updates for every version but we refresh IT suites around every 5-7 years and have stayed on XP clients with office 2003. Adobe CS we license every other of every 3 versions on average and buy a site licence. This saves us considerably on overall licensing costs with minimal impact on teaching & learning.

 

We have had the dual boot option to ubuntu for 2 years now. It is set up so that users login with their domain credentials and get their home folder and printers mapped the same as they would with windows. Teachers were instructed by senior management to learn the system and have been given staff development goals to run lessons on the Ubuntu clients. The initial view when starting Linux implementation was to go entirely open source. However as the trial has gone on the impracticality of it has become more and more obvious. The linux system boots fast and is very reliable so quick internet lessons etc routinely use Ubuntu as the kids in many cases prefer it. However CLAIT examinations and prep have to be windows at this stage. The examination software is windows only and the marking software only properly supports office files created by MS office. MS access is a unique product I have found no real OSS equivalent so when it comes to database theory there is again a dual boot to windows required.

 

Our move to Linux at the backend has been massively successful however. File servers performance has increased on the same hardware. Internal web server and internet access are incredibly reliable and all for the cost of the hardware and no continued licensing. Integration with our small room of apple imacs was also very straightforward with the open standards Linux backend.

 

Now from reading the above you might think we're so close here we might as well change exam boards to release us from MS office and make the switch and embrace the massive savings of open source..

 

The thing is however having run like this and compiled the spreadsheets etc it isn't that straight forward.

 

Time is the enemy with the Linux side. After 3 years of backend and 2 years of client linux use I like to think I'm getting pretty good with Linux. I'm entirely self taught from forums like edugeek and of course google. It has swallowed time. We're a 2 man IT department and my time on the Linux side fault finding, writing scripts for EVERYTHING and the constant tweaking required with suposedly automated patches and security updates has meant a huge increase in workload on our other technician when I'm busy with the Linux system. The Linux system has also been down for extended periods ( a few days at a time). Long term I've learned from these and I could now avoid them but there is no help out there unless you are prepared to pay huge money which makes your MS licensing look like a pittance, no one will come in and make your linux network just work after a failure. You really will be on your own as an institution.

In these situations we have been able to say "no linux system today please use windows boot option, Sorry". Without our windows system to fall back on we'd have seen massive disruption to teaching & learning and administration. To quote our head "Unacceptable dissruption" and for that reason alone we have not made the move to OSS entirely.

 

To me this is the bottom line point for OSS. The money savings look great on paper. You get rid of the set costs of Licensing. You however get a whole new raft of variable costs. We replaced 60 network cards in 2 suites that were not Linux compatible to make our dual boot system available there. The school has paid me countless hours of overtime into evenings and weekends since we switched to sort out problems. If I were to leave this job now I would be in a brilliant position to get a new and better paying job elsewhere with the skills I have acquired and conversely the school would I imagine find it hard to impossible to hire someone capable of maintaining never mind adding to our system for the 20k a year they are paying me. We have used exceptional closure days for staff training and I'm sure hours of productive time have been lost in classes adjusting staff and pupils to a new way of working. I would argue however that as long as it doesn't interfere with assesment and results learning new skills outside of the MS space is a good for them. We've lost allot of time due to downtime as well which has a cost. Windows is generally well documented, well QA tested, and well supported by vendors of 3rd party apps and hardware. That has a financial benefit even if it is hard to put on a balance sheet.

 

If I were you I would look into running an OSS solution especially for backend cost cutting. Longterm you can head that way in the classroom too but from my experience I would say a straight switch is professional suicide unless you have a much larger support and development team than I do here. If that were the case then as I mentioned above there are allot of licenses in the 20kish salary of a windows trained technician. I myself have been and will continue to work toward gettign a payrise because at this point I could be getting paid much better for less work elsewhere and the senior staff here are really starting to appreciate that having interviewed to add a 3rd technician recently. The position wasn't filled as no candidates demonstrated sufficient skills for the job. It will be re-advertised at a higher grade which is again a cost.

 

Good luck with your project you certainly have interesting times ahead. Whatever you end up doing Edugeeks will be here to help like they were for me

[jsnetman]

Buy the licences outright and try and keep them for 6 years, thats what we do here, had xp for roughly 7 years and now we are on Win 7 should be at least 4-6 years. We use a Schools Agreement Plus. Office might need ugrading more often they seem to be coming on very fast now. But you could always go Open Office for that. We tried here but staff snubbed it.

[Ethain]

We have a completely Debian GNU/Linux backend with a three Windows servers for SIMS, Antivirus management for Windows desktops, and Ringdale FollowMe printing.

 

We spent a couple of years talking about it, and a year (on and off) planning it.

 

OpenLDAP, Samba, Squid, BIND, DHCPD, with Gosa, Nagios and various other web based tools handle the backend, with rsync and lvm snapshots used for backing up data. All servers are virtualised on KVM over iSCSI. On the desktops we have a mix of Ubuntu, Mac OSX and Windows XP. We bought our Windows XP and Office 2000 licenses outright a long time ago. The same login credentials are used everywhere and we imported the schemas from OSX server so that the Apple desktops are configured from within Open LDAP on Debian.

 

The cost of migration is very high compared to business as usual, but for us still came in lower than comparative quotes for a migration to server 2008 at the backend (in fact, it came in lower than the licensing and training for VMWare alone). We were in a position where our old 2003 AD servers needed replacing so it dovetailed nicely. In the long term we're very well placed for keeping our fixed costs down on maintenance. We had the benefit of existing Linux skills so training requirements have been low. Students just get on and use everything just fine with no training, and Staff either get on with it or complain without ever trying it (from a feeling of fear, rather than experience). You must include the cost of training or contracted in support in any proposal.

 

As with any large project, there were some nasty things to sort out initially that caused lots of pain. The biggest issue was down to poor OSX documentation rather than any deliberate oversight on our part. Now installed, the network mostly gets on with things by itself and I concentrate on development work and new functionality. Our current issue is poor I/O speeds for the VMs, but this is due to having to scrimp on the storage and use SATA and software RAID, rather than fast SAS disks. Moving them across is our project for summer 2010.

 

We have a support contract for Linux on the servers (Debian in our case), which has been very responsive when we needed it.

 

For those wondering how we manage the XP machines without AD, it is a mixture of startup scripts and NT4 era NTConfig.POL files (from poledit, configured with *.adm files) in the netlogon folder. We never fiddled with the settings much in AD so the one-time cost of creating our own adm file for the appropriate registry settings was worth it. We use Windows SteadyState (free from MS) to handle Windows Update on an automated schedule.

[linuxgirlie]

hmmmm, this is a hard one.

 

We are a 700 pupil grammar school with 400+ computers/laptops etc. We use Linux on 90% of the hardware in our school., including 12 of our 14 servers.

 

It has taken us 6 years to get to this position and it wasn't easy, especially on the client side, but it was worth it.

 

The school previously had the Microsoft Schools Agreement and RM, this was ok when I first started here because they only had 80 pc's! But we were expanding rapidly and so couldn't keep with the yearly payments. The first thing we did was ditch RM and go with Linux servers (Running Karoshi) and keep the MSA. This saved a nice lump sum and none of the staff were any the wiser, apart from the school website and email system changing.

 

Next we got rid of the MSA, this meant re-installing all the computers with Linux. We did this slowly, starting with the ICT labs, and then moving onto any new machines...as we hand build all our machines this made it easier, as we just didn't buy a license at all. Once we had done this we moved onto the rest of the computers.

 

Our office staff/burser all still use Windows, though this is something we would like to change it is just not possible at the moment.

 

For software side, we just use alternatives, if a department needs software it has to be web-based or it doesn't get purchased.

 

We have had our ups and downs here, but overall its been good, new staff that come to the school just seem to fit in, especially the younger ones fresh out of Uni, they don't really take notice of what we are using, which I think is good because of the way that everyone is moving to an 'online' lifestyle, they just seem to cope with change better. The students also don't really notice either, probably for the same reason. Also on open evening we find quite a few parents who have a linux machine at home or have used OSS on their computer, so they understand what we do here.

 

And if you are worried about the students don't be, we just got an outstanding in our Ofsted, and though yes it is down to the teachers, it also shows that a member of staff teaching with a Linux computer do just the same as someone with a Windows computer.

 

Hope that is some help.

 

Jo

Edited July 2, 2010 by linuxgirlie

[KK20]

250 pcs here and an almost identical situation last year. I pursuaded our superiors of the time and cost to transfer and training vs disruption. We moved to OO instead of upgrading office 2003 to 2007 which saved us about 4k We then purchased old copies of office 2003 pro and put those on the admin staff and senior management for outlook only.

 

*REMEMBER* if you have a hint of an MS server then its CALS all round (exchange too!), something that still rankles our bursar but hey ho what can you do. We didnt swap desktops to linux. I still purchase OEM licences for our PCs but I only buy dells. Why? Central recovery! Dell OS CDs have the dell product code on them. I too started photographing licence keys and I put our device labels next to the product key for identification.

 

Unless you are a linux guru then you are mad to go down the whole route for 8k savings. Teachers will not simply switch all their documents to OO overnight. Presentations wont work, interactive boards will play up, printer drivers will be funny, that engraving machine in technology will be funny. God knows what the USB microscopes will do when they see linux.

 

See the picture? It is not worth it for 8k a year and im guessing you are a one man band - like I am - so good luck keeping it running.

[Axel]

Localzuk,

 

Have you considered VNC based thin client-ing.

 

Running VNC on a Windows server only lets other users share the same screen - no good for multi-user systems.

 

However on Linux you can run multiple VNC servers (on different ports) and set each individual client to connect to its unique VNC server. Obviously the client could be anything than can run a VNC client - so any old PC, and most thin-clients (your M75 will be able to). You can download a script to configure the Linux machine to host multiple VNC servers from: Axel: Technical Support

 

I am not suggesting this gives all the answers - but as a viable way to reduce Windows dependency it offers possibilities, and it is free to try...

[localzuk]

An update. Based on the multitude of advice I've received. We are going to move a little slower on this. So, rather than me rushing something through, we are going to incrementally start playing with bits - for example rolling out OpenOffice, Firefox (or Chrome), etc... on Windows, then move one suite over to being a linux based thin client environment, trialling a couple of teachers on Linux laptops etc...

 

This will allow me to refresh my linux knowledge, and also allow us to tweak things as we go. And most importantly, it will allow us to work on overcoming the 'ARGH!!! NEW THINGS!!!' attitude of some staff.

[linuxgirlie]

Sorry about bringing an old thread up but someone asked about Karoshi Documentation, you can now find an under construction version here Edited July 20, 2010 by linuxgirlie

[linuxgirlie]

Damn it wrong thread sorry.