On 17 Sep 2008, at 9:27 pm, Lux, James P wrote:
I think part of the problem in the Windows world is the incredible
diversity of applications (by which I include websites with
significant client side processing) that wind up being run on them.
Rich growth medium, lots of spontaneous mutations.
When you get to large desktop rollouts, Windows can have fairly low
admin overhead, but it's done by restricting flexibility (e.g. SMS,
boot from the network, etc.) to reduce the nutritional value of the
growth medium. If everyone boots the same image from the net,
applying a patch to 10,000 computers is trivial. While such an
environment would probably make everyone on this list exceedingly
unhappy (I could guarantee there's no compiler of any kind in
it..you might get a JRE, and edit your source code in MSWord), it
would (and does) serve a huge number of folks in the business world
perfectly well.
Windows in a development intensive, HPC environment, is going to be
admin expensive.
LanDESK allows us some considerable flexibility (although it's
expensive software). You can associate particular software packages
with particular users (so that if they log into a machine which
doesn't have that software installed, it happens automatically). You
can set up a self-service portal so that users can install particular
packages which the sysadmin can support centrally, but which don't
have to be installed everywhere.
Admittedly, this does mean that a sysadmin has to package up the
various bits and pieces of software, but this isn't terribly difficult
in most cases. Coupled with the extra benefits that LanDESK provides
(automatic application of security patches to both Windows and many
common Windows applications, reporting of machines which are out of
date, remote control for helping users, etc etc) it's quite a powerful
product.
It does cost, though. We're maintaining about 800 Windows PC's and
about 200 Macs with LanDESK, with one full time admin responsible for
that.
OB Beowulf: LanDESK can also manage SLES and RHAS Linux boxes,
Solaris boxes and AIX, amongst others, although I don't really see the
point - it's fairly easy to automate administration of UNIX systems
anyway.
Tim
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company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered
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