Uncertainty over Microsoft schools deal

A Good example of how Linux IS making a difference in education is to look at ESU 10 (Educational Service Unit 10) in my old homestate of Nebraska. They use Gentoo to create hardened firewalls and also CentOS for fileservers and domain controllers.

The result is that they've cut their costs considerably for all the schools they provide support for and have far less downtime due to patch install reboots. They still have Microsoft in the enterprise, but have routed it out pretty well and saved a bundle in the process.

I haven't verified exact numbers of what they've done or how much they've saved...but my friend (lived across the street from him in high school) works as a system admin there and lives and breathes gentoo and Ubuntu. http://www.esu10.org/

I'd say other school systems might want to perk their ears up and see what esu 10 in Nebraska is doing.

Here in Austin, at least in the Austin Independent School District, I have become persona getthehelloutofhere.

I tried for a solid two months to get them to spill the goods on their costs for software. The idea of a cost analysis seemed to almost panic them...at least the four upper-crust types I talked to. The part that bothers me most I think is that some sysadmin making 85k a year and working out of a basement office is roadblocking any and all changes to the system. He knows his job is on the line and he is going to do anything he can to stop the evolution or growth of that system. You might recall, I've run into that attitude in the Enterprise. I remember the name of the most vocal objection:

Swingline.

h

>Here in Austin

Austin, eh?

Why does that ring a bell? Something in the distant past...

http://dinotrac.com/articles/lostaustin.html