Re: Sendmail Training

[Jon 'maddog' Hall, Executive Director, Linux International]

Ray,

>How can you possibly justify $2k to any manager (or Wife for that matter)

I probably would not be able to justify $2k to my wife (if I had one), but I sure
could justify $2k of training on sendmail to my manager if I had three or four
thousand nodes that I was responsible for.

The justification would go like this:

"After attending this training, your system administrator will be able to set up
mail filtering, routing and managing ten percent faster, and with five percent
fewer mistakes.  In addition, efficiencies shown in this course will mean that
(on average) your sendmail daemon will use five percent less CPU cycles than
when installed right from the box."

Assuming a weighted average salary of $140,000 per year, this would save me $14K
per year just on employee salary alone, plus untold savings on less email downtime
and system savings.

Notice that Paul said:

        o four days of training (not one hour as in a LUG meeting)
        o simulated mail/network environment
        o limited to five additional people (probably a small class)

And don't even try to pull the "Microsoft would not need this".  The same thing
either occurs in MS land, or their software just can't do it.

I use Linux sendmail as it comes out of the box.  Sure, I could tune it if I wanted,
and I have the books and knowledge, but I don't have the time or need.  This is
a PROFESSIONAL mail administrator's class for people who do this most of their lives
or are going to teach it to someone else.

Is the teacher worth $2K per person?  If it is Eric Allman, you bet, but he does
not get all that money, as some goes to travel expenses, materials, etc.  And like
any instructor, there is preparation time beforehand.

As to showing up at a LUG meeting and no one shows up, I have no information or
explanation on this other than "hit shappens", and I am sure whoever called that
meeting is now kicking themselves for not being able to send out the cancellation
notice earlier.  But this type of thing is not limited to Linux, and is not the
norm.

In the meantime, perhaps one of the LUGs could set up an "end-user" or low-end
sendmail night.

md
-- 
=============================================================================
Jon "maddog" Hall
Executive Director, Linux(R) Intern'l    Director of Linux Evangelism         

Linux International                      VA Linux Systems                         
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Board Member: Uniforum Association, USENIX Association

(R)Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in several countries.


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