[ale] Recommended Support Levels

[jeff hubbs]

This is something I've given a good deal of thought to and I've pretty 
much concluded that you can dial in how much admin overhead you want to 
endure, given a certain set of business needs, based on how you design 
your setup.

If you want to live in hell, order a Dell box for everybody, use the 
Windows install that they come with, and have them all preloaded with 
Office.  Oh, and then network them peer-to-peer.  Oh, and give at least 
a quarter of them laptops.  Ha, you'll be slitting your wrists!

The last time I set an NT environment, I had it set up so that as many 
of the apps as possible ran from the file server.  The contents of the 
Start menus on each machine, the desktop settings, and the desktop icons 
were all controlled from one place.  Because people were logging in on 
their own NT domain accounts instead of as Administrator with no 
password (as I have seen countless people do, and it's nuts) there 
wasn't much damage that a virus could do to the system itself and since 
the machines ran the Lotus Notes client instead of MS Outlook, the 
chances for virus infection spreading were lower right there.

IMHO, for many work situations, people don't need to run any more apps 
than you want them to run, so there's no point letting them be able to 
install them; they'll only cause trouble, right!

And, IMNSHO, it's *insane* to give most office maggo^H^H^H^H^Husers 
1.4GHz desktops with 60GB drives (you KNOW it's happening!!).  But, you 
can't BUY a new drive of less than 20GB anymore.  This is a sign to me 
that desktop machines, as they are generally marketed and sold today, 
have no place in common networked business settings.

What I would love to do is to put together an environment where desktop 
PCs were pretty much turned into X terminals but the users didn't know 
it or care.  A small group of "app servers" would do the heavy lifting - 
THAT's where the dual 4GB Xeons with the RAID arrays would go.  The 
desktops would go driveless (poof, never replace a desktop's drive 
again!) and boot over the network from a file server.

One thing that this does is that the users can still run their P/120s 
from seven years ago and feel like they're just screamin'.  You wind up 
marginalizing desktop hardware; it's still *important,* but you don't 
have to CARE about it anywhere near as much.

Now, this does mean that you still have to be able to afford some 
serious hardware, but you don't need to have anywhere near as MUCH of 
it.  You just have to be able to build a box that can run a hundred 
instances of StarOffice (might not want to run SETI at Home on those 
boxes)!  If you're really sportin' you might want to create MOSIX 
clusters or similar to serve out your primary user apps.  Then, if you 
were watching the loads and things started to look a little tight, you 
could just put some more hamsters on the wheel.



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