Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
On Sunday 03 Apr 2011, Andrew Lynn wrote: > [snip] > Please - at least - write up this aspect of the project as a white > paper that we can circulate to govt. funded intstitutions. If you > need help with the non-technical documentation and research, I can > see if some students from our university can get involved in doing > it as research project. Would be glad to do that provided (a) the client gets discretionary control on the contents of the paper and (b) someone tells me what a white paper is actually supposed to contain. Regards, -- Raj -- Raj Mathurr...@kandalaya.org http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
2011/4/1 Raj Mathur (राज माथुर) > Background: > > The client is a large call-out business headquartered in NOIDA with call > centres in 5 other cities in India, including New Delhi. At the time we > started, they had no IT or automation on the call floor at all. > > Plugging a case for a more detailed note on this project: > > C. How the organisation is going to get support? Inhouse? services > > from vendors or consultants? Outsourced activity completely? > > L1 and hopefully L2 support will be handled within the organisation. T > and I have been working on documenting standard procedures, and in the > past 2 months or so most of them have been handed over to the client's > support team, along with some scripts that make life easier for them > (e.g. quickly make new users -- you wouldn't believe the employee > turnover these call centres have!). We still handle some L2 and most L3 > support, and that is likely to be the model going forward too. > > Incidentally, anyone with Linux technical competence interested in a > job? ;-) > > > > To sum up, it is possible to run call-out (and by extension call-in) > centres using purely FOSS tools and technologies. The two most > important things you need are: > > - A competent team or consultant who understands the technologies and > stumbling blocks involved, and > Adding the obigatory message of congratulations through all the snipping of your original post. I am sure with your expertise, that the solution was elegantly crafted, customised and met the customer's requirements. > - Commitment from the organisation's management and technical leaders to > the solution. > It does take two hands to clap. The CTO/technical leader who took this up is extemely gutsy and also deserves a place in the hall of fame. What I would really be interested in is a revisiting of this issue a few months down the line to see the effective response, resultant uptime and cost of the support mechansim you mentioned earlier. Please - at least - write up this aspect of the project as a white paper that we can circulate to govt. funded intstitutions. If you need help with the non-technical documentation and research, I can see if some students from our university can get involved in doing it as research project. I say this as I am fighting a losing battle over something like a network monitoring and management system. To much plugging for proprietary plug-and-play as it is an easy to understand product-based purchase, and the alternative is too much overhead - making the detailed spec for even a tender is beyond the capabilities of in-house staff. > Given these, there is no reason why a FOSS solution cannot surpass > proprietary, commercial solutions in features and performance, and > undercut it thoroughly where pricing is concerned. > > Another case for putting non-technical details together: Even if "undercut" - the expenditure on the project is distributed to the local community who are empowered by the use of FOSS. Although not of direct practical use such as a HOW-TO, documenting successful projects as examples of creating career opportunities and services has a wider benefit in advertising both to govt. and SMEs the capabilities of both FOSS, and of its community. Andrew ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
On Sunday 03 Apr 2011, Mahesh T. Pai wrote: > Raju Mathur said on Sun, Apr 03, 2011 at 08:35:08AM +0530,: > > installed is from the standard Debian repositories -- Testing on > > the servers, and Stable on the clients. As far as I know, > > there's nothing > > I find this choice rather strange. It is usually the other way around > stable on servers and testing (even unstable / experimental) on > clients. > > Why? > > Is it because they are not using the typical desktop / office / > productivity suites? Testing on servers since we needed the latest packages. Stable on desktops since it's, er, stable :) Regards, -- Raj -- Raj Mathurr...@kandalaya.org http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
Raju Mathur said on Sun, Apr 03, 2011 at 08:35:08AM +0530,: > installed is from the standard Debian repositories -- Testing on the > servers, and Stable on the clients. As far as I know, there's nothing I find this choice rather strange. It is usually the other way around stable on servers and testing (even unstable / experimental) on clients. Why? Is it because they are not using the typical desktop / office / productivity suites? -- Mahesh T. Pai || >From The Devil's Dictionary (1881-1906) [devil]: LAWYER, n. One skilled in circumvention of the law. ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
On Sunday 03 Apr 2011, Mahesh T. Pai wrote: > Raju Mathur said on Fri, Apr 01, 2011 at 10:22:09PM +0530,: > > Once again, sorry to dash cold water on expectations > > I fully agree and concur with the need to protect the client's > privacy / terms of contract. Thank you for understanding. > 1. Debian has 3 sections - "main", "non-free" and "contrib". The >classification is based on licensing /and/ freeness of >dependencies. Apart from hardware specific packages, anything that >is not in Debian? The only non-repository packages we installed (which were also FOSS, BTW) were dealing with drivers for the specific PSTN interface equipment connected to the Asterisk servers. Apart from that, everything installed is from the standard Debian repositories -- Testing on the servers, and Stable on the clients. As far as I know, there's nothing from Non-free either, with the exception of some ethernet firmware needed by newer servers. > 2. Debian takes pride in packaging anything with a free (as in >freedom) license. Did you have to customise any package? (in any >way - like recompile against a specific library version; rebuild a >kernel,e tc) ? As above, only the specific drivers and tools for the PSTN interface hardware was compiled from source. > 3. What was the documentation about? As you have rightly pointed, the >community has no use for documentation on things like reducing / >elevating user privileges within the installation. Or how they >manage the sudoers group. Oh, some scripting done, how to use the scripts effectively, what files to provide the scripts in what format, how to diagnose telephony problems, etc. For instance, I'd mentioned that we use separate servers for SIP registrations and PSTN dial-out, so diagnosing a tele-sales officer not being able to call is a multi-step process -- can she ping the SIP server? Is her phone registered? Is her user ID available in the server? Is the SIP server registered with the PSTN server? Are calls coming up to the SIP server? Are they being passed to the PSTN server? Is a PSTN line down? Is a PRI misbehaving? As you can see, each individual step is quite generic, while the whole diagnostic process is completely tailored to the client's specific architecture and would probably not be very useful in another context. > Actually, I should confess that you had to do any documentation at > all - I do an occasional single PC install, and most of > documentation is available on the F! key. But of course, we are not > comparing cats and horses! Being a good coder (I think!), I cordially detest having to do documentation, while I fully support /other/ programmers documenting their code and processes to the fullest extent possible :) Tirveni's much better at documenting stuff than I am, thank $deity! Regards, -- Raj -- Raj Mathurr...@kandalaya.org http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
Raju Mathur said on Fri, Apr 01, 2011 at 10:22:09PM +0530,: > Once again, sorry to dash cold water on expectations (though with the I fully agree and concur with the need to protect the client's privacy / terms of contract. I hope you will be able to give some answers to the following specific questions. 1. Debian has 3 sections - "main", "non-free" and "contrib". The classification is based on licensing /and/ freeness of dependencies. Apart from hardware specific packages, anything that is not in Debian? 2. Debian takes pride in packaging anything with a free (as in freedom) license. Did you have to customise any package? (in any way - like recompile against a specific library version; rebuild a kernel,e tc) ? Aw - I recall a post you made long time back about a samba installation. ;-D 3. What was the documentation about? As you have rightly pointed, the community has no use for documentation on things like reducing / elevating user privileges within the installation. Or how they manage the sudoers group. Actually, I should confess that you had to do any documentation at all - I do an occasional single PC install, and most of documentation is available on the F! key. But of course, we are not comparing cats and horses! -- Mahesh T. Pai || That men do not learn much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach us. --Aldous Huxley ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
On Friday 01 Apr 2011, Yashpal Nagar wrote: > On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 4:19 PM, Manish wrote: > > This is great. Congratulations! Are you also planning to document > > the experience and approach as a case study suitable for PHBs? > > Looking forward to see it in the likes of DQ, PCQ, LFYs, Profit > > etc. > > It is amusing to read the whole story of FOSS's ability and the > potential it have. The complete debian desktop within 10min over the > network with only a network port as requirement is panacea for the > industry like 'call centres' where bringing up the machine ASAP is > always high on demand. I'm sure you must have done some tailoring > while deciding on the packages to have in the image, please share > some details on that as well. Once again, sorry to dash cold water on expectations (though with the mercury rising cold water isn't such a bad thing!), but we /are/ bound by verbal NDAs to the client. Whatever is generic (and doesn't take too much effort to put into publishable form) can be shared. Whatever is specific to the client, or reveals aspects of his operations or strategy, is absolutely confidential... I wouldn't want to breach anyone's trust, and I'm sure you wouldn't want me to do that either. I apologise for us coming off as information hoarders (though I do believe that whatever we've done and are doing is aligned with the spirit and intent of freedom in software); on the other hand, when we agreed to do the project we made a commitment to the client, and that is not a commitment that we can retrospectively withdraw from. The only alternative was to not make the commitment and not do the project, but WTH, if we hadn't done the project this discussion wouldn't have arisen anyway. Thanks for all the congratulations, folks! After the money they make life in the FOSS world worth living :) Regards, -- Raj -- Raj Mathurr...@kandalaya.org http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
On Friday 01 Apr 2011, Vikas Rawal wrote: > > L1 and hopefully L2 support will be handled within the > > organisation. T and I have been working on documenting standard > > procedures, and in the past 2 months or so most of them have been > > handed over to the client's support team, along with some scripts > > that make life easier for them > > Do you/company plan to make some of this documentation available for > use to wider community or will they be only for the company? I would > think a lot of people would be interested in such documentation. Well, a lot of the documentation is specific for our client's operations, and I doubt if we'd be allowed to release that, and even if we were it would be of limited usefulness to anyone else. Apart from that there is some documentation on setting up various types of systems; now that we could hypothetically release, but again there's tons of client-specific stuff embedded into that. In general, then, the answer to your question would be "no". However, I really haven't examined the docs with a microscope so far to see which would be generic enough to release (and be useful), so I guess we could take the decision on a case by case basis -- if the opportunity comes up to solve a problem by sharing a doc, and if the doc is generic enough, we'd have no problem in releasing it. The real issue here is that one of the things the client paid us to do was document. I see no easy way to take those commissioned documents and release them generally without the client's consent. In any case Tirveni and I are available to share whatever we've learnt if anyone asks a specific related question. Regards, -- Raj -- Raj Mathurr...@kandalaya.org http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 4:19 PM, Manish wrote: > > This is great. Congratulations! Are you also planning to document > the experience and approach as a case study suitable for PHBs? > Looking forward to see it in the likes of DQ, PCQ, LFYs, Profit etc. > > It is amusing to read the whole story of FOSS's ability and the potential it have. The complete debian desktop within 10min over the network with only a network port as requirement is panacea for the industry like 'call centres' where bringing up the machine ASAP is always high on demand. I'm sure you must have done some tailoring while deciding on the packages to have in the image, please share some details on that as well. Congratulations!!! Regards, Yash ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
2011/4/1 Raj Mathur (राज माथुर): > Background: > > The client is a large call-out business headquartered in NOIDA with call > centres in 5 other cities in India, including New Delhi. �At the time we > started, they had no IT or automation on the call floor at all. > > Before you see the words "call centre" and freak out, let me assure you > that this is one of those professional ones -- any telecaller found > calling a DNC number is immediately and publicly terminated. �In fact, > preventing calling of DNC was one of the reasons they wanted to give up > manual calling and switch to an IT solution where call-outs could be > controlled. > > All the implementation decisions were taken by Tirveni and I in > conjunction with the client's technical team. �We decided to go with > Asterisk for the telephony part and Linux desktops with headsets for the > tele-callers. > > To answer the specific questions Sudhanwa and Nirmalya put up: > [snip: answers to technical questions (100 lines)] > We were lucky to partner with a very competent networking company for > the LAN portion. �The switch/VLAN design they did is also responsible > for the smoothness of the whole operation. > > To sum up, it is possible to run call-out (and by extension call-in) > centres using purely FOSS tools and technologies. �The two most > important things you need are: > > - A competent team or consultant who understands the technologies and > stumbling blocks involved, and > - Commitment from the organisation's management and technical leaders to > the solution. > > Given these, there is no reason why a FOSS solution cannot surpass > proprietary, commercial solutions in features and performance, and > undercut it thoroughly where pricing is concerned. > This is great. Congratulations! Are you also planning to document the experience and approach as a case study suitable for PHBs? Looking forward to see it in the likes of DQ, PCQ, LFYs, Profit etc. Congrats again. -- Manish ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
--- On Fri, 4/1/11, Vikas Rawal wrote: > From: Vikas Rawal > Subject: Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India > To: ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org > Date: Friday, April 1, 2011, 3:24 PM > > > > L1 and hopefully L2 support will be handled within the > organisation. T > > and I have been working on documenting standard > procedures, and in the > > past 2 months or so most of them have been handed over > to the client's > > support team, along with some scripts that make life > easier for them > > Do you/company plan to make some of this documentation > available for > use to wider community or will they be only for the > company? I would > think a lot of people would be interested in such > documentation. > > Vikas > It would be good idea if you put the document in some wiki. --- নির্মাল্য লাহিড়ী [Nirmalya Lahiri] +৯১-৯৪৩৩১১৩৫৩৬ [+91-9433113536] ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
> > L1 and hopefully L2 support will be handled within the organisation. T > and I have been working on documenting standard procedures, and in the > past 2 months or so most of them have been handed over to the client's > support team, along with some scripts that make life easier for them Do you/company plan to make some of this documentation available for use to wider community or will they be only for the company? I would think a lot of people would be interested in such documentation. Vikas ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
Re: [ilugd] [LONG] Re: Large Debian installations in India
2011/4/1 Raj Mathur (राज माथुर) > Tirveni did tons of preseed magic on the desktop front, and we now have > a process where you can put a bare machine on the LAN, select "Boot from > network" (PXE boot) and have a working, customised Debian desktop ready > for use in 10 minutes. > I would love to know the details of the process. We have tried to do PXE boot for installation in our college labs, but got stuck somewhere both the times we tried. -- Kartik Singhal http://k4rtik.wordpress.com/ ___ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
