Date: Tue, 26 Oct 1999 09:17:05 -0600 From: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> To: Stephen McKay <syssgm@detir.qld.gov.au> Cc: freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Need anti-exchange ammunition Message-ID: <3815C5F1.3D4F3B14@softweyr.com> References: <199910261348.XAA16538@nymph.detir.qld.gov.au>
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Stephen McKay wrote: > > In fact, the whole thing has been sold as a money saving operation. But > not from equipment or software costs, but administration costs. For this > sort of thing, management are utterly convinced that point and click is > better than a command line interface. After all, they have no idea what > to do with a command line interface, and their Unix jockeys are way > expensive. Ergo, in with the GUI, out with the CLI! > > To summarise that point (because I'm sure we could have a big advocacy > storm on this one if we really wanted), the reasoning goes like this: > expensive people use CLI, cheap people use GUI, so let's buy a lot of > GUI software. It's not really about sendmail vs exchange. Was any thought given to purchasing the commercial, supported Sendmail Pro GUI for administration? See http://www.sendmail.com/guide/index.html. > Someone asked about sizing. We have approximately the same number of Unix > server admins as Novell server admins, and about twice as many Unix boxes > as Novell boxes. This is partially because the existing mail system is > CCMail, and that keeps them busy repairing it all the time. A couple NT > boxes have appeared under the guise of pilot studies. There are a whole > heap of PC support people who manage desktops and do the user hand holding > stuff. My partner is a full-time UNIX SA for a local call-center company. They have 21 large HP machines, 2 Sun servers, and one lonely UnixWare machine, and 2 SAs. They only had one until 4 months ago, when they hired a backup so they wouldn't have to call Jody everytime one of the Oracle DBAs hiccuped. They also have 8 NT servers owned by the "end luser computing" group, and 7 full-time NT admins to keep them running. I'll leave the math up to you. > Our current mail system supports about 1500 people. We know we could do > the lot with imap and a couple FreeBSD boxes (distributed over the state), > but I've discovered that the killer argument is that the mail program must > come with a scheduler/organiser, just like CCMail. Again, management are > utterly convinced that scheduling and mail are the same stuff. They can > point to CCMail and say "We want one just like this, except that works". > We have nothing to offer, calendar wise. Suggestions solicited! Netscape Enterprise server. If there is a (recent) version that runs on FreeBSD, I'd love to hear about it. It's certainly a better answer than Ex-crud. > Someone mentioned NDS. This is the new wonder product, I'm told. We are > getting it here in a big way, and it will link in with Exchange too. > Apparently it will replace all our account login details on every system > in our entire organisation, and will replace DNS and DHCP. Phew! That's > another story though, and we are well advanced in arguing against it. > Still, if anyone has any reason to believe that NDS distributed replication > doesn't work, I'm all ears. :-) In fact NDS works pretty well. It's a damn good thing we have LDAP support in FreeBSD, isn't it? > In fact, the "Save Our DNS/DHCP" campaign is the only thing to bear fruit > so far. Partially it's because of my catchy slogan: > > "It's a text file. And we *love* it!" > > referring to the plain text config files which we use for everything, and > which we revision control and grep etc, vs the difficulty of doing anything > sensible with a GUI. The slogan is so catchy that I've convinced a layer > or two of management to fight our cause. In the "you win some, you lose > some" situation, I'll keep the DNS, DHCP and password file, and lose the > mail system, if I have to. Tell them they can use the RCS logs to determine who to fire when somebody screws up. Managers just love having someone to point a finger at. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC wes@softweyr.com http://softweyr.com/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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