dmj

That was my move to Linux, in school and home. I was tempted by all the miracles that windows 7 would bring, but in the end it didn't ring true and I made a better move (and career) with Linux.

It all depends on use case, but in the context of the OP's question about implementing RAID and backups its the solution I would go with.

You wouldn't need to change anything from the user or domain perspective. It's no different than running VMWare etc. It's not a huge change.

zpool create 😜 it rather depends on what you are starting with and what the use case is. I guess QNAP, TrueNAS or similar is the easiest

the University I was working at did essentially the same thing - but 15min snapshots, which was a lifeline for users who needed to revert a document before the days of google docs.

Going back a few (15?) years we just setup a lamp stack and had the students upload using their regular credentials. It was using mod_userdir IIRC. I don't think I've even looked at apache lately but it was a good 'old school' solution and sounds like essentially what they are doing, just hosted in school.

yes, you can use replication which will backup everything, including snapshots. There's a good guide here: https://klarasystems.com/articles/openzfs-storage-best-practices-and-use-cases-part-1-snapshots-and-backups/

No insult. I appreciate schools are behind on budget, training etc but this one is a no brainer for me - Free software that's been developed since the days of WindowsXP, super stable and in use by many large orgs. I guess that's what edugeek is for, to help understand some of the options. "if it's working, why change it?" a couple of things: RAID6 doesn't do dedupe, replication, snapshot to remote locations, and isn't suitable as a backup. You could save money on you backup solution, not worry about adding raid cards to your servers: simply it's a better solution more features at a lower cost.

Yes, depending on how you run it. The last place I worked ( in education) we had 4000 windows desktops and all our servers running on ZFS. We could snapshot every 15 mins.

Oh was that me. Yeah get your sh*t together.

I'm still shocked that anyone even considers hardware raid in 2025. ZFS has been around for DECADES! Is this just a case of 'i can't find an .exe' for it so won't learn? Or something else?

I use a steamdeck as my desktop I hear that steam are releasing steamos 3.0 for desktop soon, though you could use Arch

SteamOS and Fedora at home and Ubuntu for work. Almost all of the software I need for work is macos or linux based (or it's a super PITA to get it working on windows). Most of the department have Macs though.

The point I was making is that with SIMS you need windows clients and the surrounding infra. With a web based MIS you can use much cheaper clients with just a web browser: ChromeOs or any of the other managed linuxes.

just put a linux on it https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HP_Chromebook_14

I wasn't sure anybody was going to get it TBH!

Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!

still more complex, more expensive, less reliable and less scalable than running serverless in free tier

I guarantee deploying a container is fewer clicks than managing a web server. I deployed dev platform for our marketing department last week (2 containes). It's been running for a few days and has cost them 70p so far. It took about 2 mins by hand. Of course I'll productionalise this in terraform and put a proper load balancer in front of it, but please don't try and make out that serverless is something only multi nationals do, or that desktop technicians are somehow incapable.

But is much easier to run a container, give it to Google/Amazon and let them manage/scale it. We do serverless because it's easier, not because it's making life difficult !

I did the AZ104 course which was ok. I worked on Azure for a number of years but since moved to a company using GCP. I must say it was a breath of fresh air and all round a much better product. If there's not a political reason to go with Azure I would strongly recommend looking at AWS and GCP as you might find them a better fit.

^^^ this. You've been able to automate this since the mid 90's

You shouldn't need to rdp into a server. I barely ever even shell into one.

MacBook and send them home then?

Thought about building your own? https://openwrt.org/toh/openwrt/one or perhaps bpi-r4 (needs an additional card for Wifi7, and another adapter for PoE) then manage it all centrally https://github.com/openwisp