Saya forwardkan suatu artikel mengenai pengalaman seorang "administrator" saya ambil dari www.nerdherd.det ============================================================================ Hello, this is my story. I'm Flavio, I'm 16 and I study at Colegio Miguel de Cervantes, at Sao Paulo, Brazil. Before you read my case, please read Chris Carlin's story They are similar because in both cases we're dealing with high schools that have incompetent people above us. We also suffer from a lot of bureaucracy that prevents our work from being done. Anyway, the school has this computer network for about 6 years. It was first a Novell network and was recently converted to a WinNT network. For obvious reasons, both are expensive, difficult to administer (no matter what MS says), slow and very limited when it comes to extra services. I've studied there for 8 years, but I only got to use the computer lab in high school, and that was when I gave enough attention to this problem. There is one network for each computer lab, and they are not interconnected. Each lab has 8 computers on average, but only about 5 are working (the so called 'administrator' doesn't realise that he can keep just 1 pc offline if he uses its parts to fix the other 2). Of the 5 that do work, generally only 3 have network access, due to misconfiguration problems and/or hardware problems.... Each lab has internet access, provided by one 33.6kbps modem. It's very slow, as you may imagine. The modem is on the NT server, which doesn't make anything right, specially when it comes to masquerading. One of the networked computers has an HP DeskJet 660C printer, which serves the entire room. But this computer sometimes has problems with the spool and we frequently have to restart it. When I saw the state of this network I suggested we install an experimental Linux server. We'd gradually implement services in it and we would start using it instead of the NT. There would be a day when the NT server would be useless. But first let me describe the administrator.... He is also the so called CS teacher. He has no clue about programming in C or similar languages. The only languages he knows are HTML and BASIC. I'm not exaggerating here. He frequently comes to me and asks how to password protect things in http servers and similar simple matters. All the computers are P100's with 16mb of RAM. The server is a P166 with 32mb of ram. I told him that if we got one of those semi-broken P100 that weren't being used, we could install Linux in it and kick the P166's ass by far. I had to explain what Linux was. I also had to tell him it's free. And I told him that it had support for everything we (read: I) needed. He agreed to it. I installed Linux on one of the boxes. I had everything fixed, every package I wanted to work on was installed. Some simple configuring and I'd get Samba running and kick the NT out of the internal network. Some more minutes and I'd have masquerading working. I just needed the new kernel.... I decided that I'd go home, get the kernel, put it on a spare hard disk that I had, put some fine applications on it and take it back to school the next day. That's exactly what I did, I even compiled the kernel at home to save time. Well, it turns out that the other day the admin's assistant (if the admin's a moron, imagine his assistant) tells me that the machine has been repartitioned and formatted. Windows has been installed on that machine. I asked him if it was a joke. He told me it wasn't. So they suddenly decide to use the box that was left idle for almost a month. The so-called assistant told me that a 486 with 8mb of ram was being provided for my Linux server. I asked him again if this was some kind of joke. Imagine a 486 serving a network full of P100. Does that make any sense? No. I walked out and told him to never mind, that he and his friend may have their NT network. Summing up, it turns out that these people were afraid of Linux. If I installed it they wouldn't know how to administer the network. Flavio would administer it, there would be no need for them to be there, because it woudn't crash. Incompetence pays. They like using products from Microsoft, they like paying for systems that are slow and crash all the time. All on the excuse that Windows is easier to use and administer. Sure, it may be easier to use on the client's side, but certainly not on the server side. But they refuse to admit that. I want their network to go to hell, I wasn't trying to improve the network for myself in the first place. I already know how to use Linux, I already have fast Internet access at home. I would be improving the network the the other students and for the teachers who actually use it and want it to be productive. But if the bureaucracy doesn't let me, screw it. * Gunadarma Mailing List -------------------------------------- * Archives : http://milis-archives.gunadarma.ac.id * Berhenti : 'unsubscribe' ke [EMAIL PROTECTED] * Administrator: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
