Ray,
Thanks for the response, you are always very helpful and prompt.
However, you misread the "judgment passing" portion of my post in quite a severe
light. You should observe that, bitching aside, the post indicated genuine concern
about whether or not my host was causing problems for the network- I supplied
legitimate suspects. My criticism was directed only at "the system"- no allegations
of incompetence were ever directed at our onsite system administrator (a teacher that
I admire immensely)- I criticized the fact that he was given no authority, not that he
didn't know what he was doing. I think that you will agree that not giving an onsite
administrator domain administrator privileges makes for a poorly run system. And it
is in many other ways; the contractors that are called in to troubleshoot, for
example, are only paid for fixing problems. This hardly builds in the right
incentives to build a stable system. Our onsite administrator has to email changes to
the school's website to someone downtown!
I was wrong to say "obviously in a well-run system, this wouldn't be a problem",
because I implied that running more than one OS on a network is trivial; I did not
make it clear that by "system" I meant all of the parts, human and machine, including
an adequate supply of well paid, well-trained administrators in the right places. I
would further guess that in a well-run system (one without ALL of the authority for a
system running thousands of computers concentrated in a location that is physically
remote from each one of the sites) I wouldn't have been asked to disconnect (let alone
shutdown AND hide the network cable) for a computer just because it is running Linux.
Technically, it seems that the rules are that I'm not even allowed to bring in a
computer from the outside, so the fact that I'm allowed to turn it back on if I put
Windows on it and remove Linux is even bending the rules, which is so much more
ridiculous given that it's not like they're handing a computer to every teacher.
I also wanted to make it clear that I've entered the teaching profession from an
extremely strong technical background (mostly programming though, quite different from
system administration). I am very eager to put this background to good use for the
school and the district. However, the fact that my school's system administrator is
not given any actual authority makes it seem awfully unlikely that I'll be able to
make much of a difference.
None of this is really here nor there in terms of Linux issues, but perhaps I wanted
to make the case that "Linux newbie with silly questions" doesn't imply "insensitive
person, ignorant to the ways of machine and beast."
Jonathan
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