Re: [seul-edu] Microsoft Cans Linux in Spanish

[Leon Brooks <leon@brooks.fdns.net>]

On Tuesday 04 December 2001 07:59 am, you wrote:
> Here's a quote from the article:

> | the Linux Web server - used as an external Internet proxy server, mail
> | host and filtering system made it difficult for teachers, students and
> | administrators to create and post documents to the school's intranet,
> | and to synchronize that site with the school's public Internet site.

> | To post a document to the intranet, users had to go to the network
> | directory, find a list of shares, go to the correct HTML directory, and
> | drag files to the appropriate folder. Having to take these steps made it
> | less likely that students would share projects, that teachers would
> |share lesson plans, or that administrators share memos and reports. It
> | also increased support costs, as users were continually emailing
> | documents to the IT support staff with requests that they be posted to
> | the intranet.

Bit of a puzzle, since this is *exactly* what said users would be doing under 
Windows, unless Beacon is stupid enough to store the content on individual 
user machines (this would be a serious security headwhacker on a school 
intranet besides being a bear to maintain). PEBKAC error (Problem Exists 
Between Keyboard And Chair), methinks.

Captain Fantastic, the administrator there, has obviously never heard of 
technologies like DAV, LDAP and so on which ship with anything even vaguely 
modern by way of a Linux distribution, and he's evidently not heard of 
user-mode authentication, either. Adding any of these technologies to his mix 
would improve the useability (e.g. point each drongo user's home directory at 
the appropriate webserver section and connect H: to //server/home on startup).

Free and Open products like fsync will absolutely eat anything available on 
Windows for rapid and efficient mirroring of intranet content (or anything 
else).

In short, the lack of an email response is unsurprising, particularly in 
light of the then-planned Exchange migration (AKA lemming mode).

Cheers; Leon