dustmite

Hey, I thought someone might be interested in the following position: ICT Technician/Assistant Network Manager Not sure what else to say really! Thanks, Dusty

Thanks for this. The responses they've come up with so far are particularly useful. I'm certainly finding it difficult to argue against my friends at the educational ICT errr, well, business unit I guess. I did use a substantial amount of the points that were raised to argue against them and failed miserably because they kept waffling on about the 'bigger picture'. However, at the end of the day the only person I have to justify myself to is the headteacher and then to sincerely hope that she listens to me over them.

You'd think so, wouldn't you? Except that we're the very last local authority to 'benefit' (haha) from BSF. I use Linux equally for it's stability. Their response to my using PHP and Apache on Linux was that I could just as easily run it on Windows and that it's performance was "just as good". I did try my hardest to point out the flaws in their thinking... This is certainly what made me laugh. They criticise my choice, tell me it is a risk and suggest we should use a corporate piece of software with better support and investment. What is county currently using..? I bet you can't guess!

Hi there, I had an interesting meeting today, after my headteacher had invited the County Council's Educational ICT people into the school to 'audit' my network as part of a project of them 'merging' our curriculum and administrative networks by just installed SIMS onto the curriculum network. (I dread how much money we're paying them!) Their audit, of high sophistication (involving logging on to about 30 machines and just using a tool to take what software and hardware is installed... and very little lip service played to the network infrastructure!), has identified an area of significant risk on our network. They have decided that running Linux carries a significant level of risk to the stability and 'long-term security' of the school network. They believe (and claimed to be speaking in terms of corporate strategy) that Linux carries this risk because it is used in a minority of schools and is in an absolute minority with the educational industry. They further believe that the lack of support and the lack of qualified staff in the use of Linux results in a solution that is unmangable in the situation that I leave the employment of the school. Or, should we ever be in a situation where we have to outsource, or work in collaboration with an outside technical partner, that we will have to replace the solutions with Windows. They then started talking about commercial support, and that as there's none with Linux (unless you use RedHat ES, or SuSE [which I don't]), that you're introducing a further level of risk. Our current server setup consists of: DC01/2 - Windows Server 2003 boxes providing DNS, DHCP, AD, WDS, WSUS. WS01/2 - Gentoo Linux boxes providing web services, namely the VLE, webmail, and the intra/extranet. Running Apache 2, PHP 5, MySQL 5, Moodle, LAMS, and such. PX01 - Gentoo Linux box providing proxy and filtering to pupils. Running Squid, Squidguard and a php interface to it. (Remind me, at some point, to release the scripts that manage this system!) MX01 - Gentoo Linux box providing mail services. Running qmail and dbmail (dbmail's an odd choice, but it makes sense in terms of pulling email from place to place... it's sql based, and well documented) TX01 - RHEL box providing KS3 Testing. So, to summarise, they believe that the risk is caused by: lack of corporate support for Linux, lack of experienced Linux personnel in the education sector that can use Linux, lack of 'industry standard' through the use of Linux, Non-compliance with the 'Bigger Picture' of interoperability in schools and federated directories. They have thus decided to inform the headteacher of this 'significant level of risk' and recommend that this is something that we resolve by means of replacing the solutions with Exchange, ISA and IIS. In addition to this, they suggested that the only reason that we use Linux (and, Moodle for our VLE), is that they're free. I was rather furious at this point, and almost told them to leave my site before I started jabbing them with a handy HB pencil. I strongly, very strongly, believe that we should not be in a situation of vendor lock-in, and choosing the pure MS network that they are suggesting introduces a similar level of risk as a result of being stuck with using one solution from one supplier. Certainly, performance and as a result the cost in maintenance would increase. Now, the reason that I'm posting this is that I'm aware it's going to take them a week or so to send the report to the headteacher informing her of the 'problem'. What I'm asking for, from my fellow EduGeekers is some help in explaining that this risk is purely imagined (or so I hope) by the County Council. I would be greatly appreciative of any help, any case studies of your own use of Linux/*nix, and any handy statistics, quotes, knowledge, or even offers of entering into a conversation/debate with my headteacher on this matter. As a result, all of the information I gather in this exercise, I shall assemble (with your permission) into a report that I shall provide to my headteacher (before she gets the one from County...) and will most happily provide a completed copy of this report to the EduGeek community should it prove to be of use to anyone else! Many thanks, Dusty (I apologise for the length of this post, but I feel that if I give a bigger background, that I may well be able to work towards making a document/report that is of use to the whole community, rather than something that I use just once and throw away. Certainly, I'm aware how strongly worded the report they're going to send to my headteacher is, and as such I want to be able to head it off whilst I can!)

Quoting myself, dreadful. My tale of doom continues. Last night they advised me to see if it "fixes itself", despite the fact I've already (rather succintly I thought) pointed out that the file's the correct size, but the APS refuses to aknowledge that it's downloaded. Ho hum. Their advice was to "phone back tomorrow". I guess that's going to be another wasted day...

RM made them available Monday, according to the chap I'm speaking to at the moment. For us, at least, it's broken and not downloading properly. Well. That's not strictly true. The file's downloading ok, but the APS is convinced the download is still pending and failing. Ho hum, wasted the best part of a day on the phone to them.

I've been using it for quite a while now, I dread to imagine how long infact. What I have found is that it's proving invaluable to provide decent audit trails. One feature that was specifically requested is that we keep a PDF copy of the printouts from certain printers and users, in relation to an issue we had with lots of print-outs of the head attached to a pink car (less said about that one the better.). The pre and posthooks that PyKota permits are exceptionally useful for this and many other such requests that my SMT have. Admittedly this isn't quite the use that PyKota was created for, but still. We don't really use it for quota tracking, as our current Head of ICT is against quotas, but, the Head herself likes quotas. So the functionality is there as I imagine at some point I shall be instructed by the Head to implement it.

I've been informed by our SMT and KS3 coordinator for ICT that we are to go ahead with the test whilst it is still available. However, we're not overly bothered about how well/badly it goes, per se. Our concern is primarily that it keeps Ofsted, and our lovely friends from the Inspection and Advisory service at the LA happy. It's easier to keep those who judge happy than to have to provide justification as to why not. 'Course, I've had to get RM... sorry, I mean, the NAA (I do love that) to send me the Software all over again after one of my team got a wee bit overzealous at the news. Our old KS3 Test Server found itself being dismantled and used to make a new all powerful CAD/CAM PC. I do love my staff...

I started using this a while back as the basis of (yet another) custom system I've built at work. It's really very very good, I wrote a few pre and post hooks to extend the system some more... and, ever since a few bizarre incidents relating to images of the headteacher in a pink car (We won't go there...) we make pdf copies of the printouts, which are deleted every couple of days automagically. It's a very good solution to a common problem though, certainly a helpful tool in the box.

One of ours is going on for 7 years, although, the task that it does it does well - it's a small webserver handling the output of one of our login scripts and outputting it with bunch of basic database writes (to another server, may I very quickly add). Of course, I have shiny new servers coming in to replace my old estate soon... woohoo!

I remember when I applied for my current job, took them over two/three months to actually reply to the application... by which point I had given up hope. A letter then mysteriously appears in the post offering me an interview... for the next day. Fortunately I was contracting, so, that was easy enough to attend. Heard back, bizarrely, within the same day. Originally I was told the interview would last about an hour, three and a half hours later I'm having coffee and a chat with the headteacher about my life story, who took a bizarre interest into me. Anyway, I leave the site with a concerning, "We may offer you the job, but, we have some things to sort out, I'll have an answer for you later this evening." 3pm comes... and I'm offered it. So n'yes, schools can take a long time in doing things sometimes, certainly isn't a bad thing, they're normally quite quick to turn people down but are much slower at accepting them.

And don't forget Censornet's occasional issues with apostrophes... I ended up deciding to roll our own web proxy, given the issues that IPCop/SW/Censornet have (well, given that they all have the same origin...). I keep planning to release the code at some point, afterall, it's only a few php and shell scripts that interface with squidguard, squid and the like. Although, if I ever did release it, I'd have to write an installer. Meh. The system itself uses NTLM-based authentication against the domain logon, with two classes of user 'Staff', who aren't logged (unions have issues...), and 'Pupil'. Pupil's access can be controlled between normal, whitelisted and banned states. Individual rooms can also be switched between the three states too. The script uses DNS, at the moment, to decide which machines belong inside which room... I will, when I have sufficient caffeine extend that to querying AD and using that as the basis for the DNS lookup, instead of hardcoding the number of machines per room that it needs to lookup. I guess that's why I dislike other solutions, I'm too much of a fiddler... and perhaps because I spent too long working with the SW team.

Now, I have to admit that I almost completely agree with what you're saying. I was brought into the school which I work at on the basis, I believe, of my corporate experience in order to hammer out the issues that existed here. When I got here, the network consisted of 200+ workstations and a sole Windows 2000 Server (this was only a year ago...) which had a large number of question marks floating over it. After evaluating the network a few key choices had to be made. Primarily issues existed with the way students had only access to the internet, their printing facilities (ie, lack of 'decent' logging), an irritance with the dreadful security log in Windows Server and a slight irritance with the lack of flexibility provided. Fortunately my background is one of software development, and, given the sheer costs required to replace this single, aging, server, Mr Dusty decided to roll out a hybrid backend. The solutions designed (including a custom built proxy - One day, I hope, the HT will let me release the source as a GPL/BSD-Licenced OSS project) are generally Linux based, however, there is now two Windows 2003 DCs providing the usual plethora of services required for a well controlled Windows client based network. Personally, at the moment, I don't feel that Linux is completely suited to being used on the clients within the school environment, unless being used as a thin-client, because it lacks decent support of specialist or niche software that staff are happy to purchase constantly despite better alternatives being available. However, due to the delights DiDA, software like Macromedia Suite and Adobe Creative Suite, have become a staple diet for the curriculum network and until such time that these work on Linux, there's pretty much no possibility for Linux to be used on all client workstations within our curriculum network. Sad, but I have to admit, Windows wins on our clients. I'll go cry now at my beloved Linux being shunned by my very own self. --Dusty (Linux fan, code hugger and a huge supporter of hybrid backends)