[brlug-general] Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik Responds... 11/21/04

[Will Hill]

On Monday 14 February 2005 02:28 pm, Andrew Baudouin wrote:
>You have to hire the same staff to support both infrastructures and 
>with 2K3's Software Update Services, distributing updates is a 
>point-click operation.

The staffing ratio windoze to *nix, I'm told, is 5 to 1.  

I've seen Bankone do a Windoze upgrade and it was anything but point and 
click.  Anti-copy junk in the registry and elsewhere required painful manual 
visits to each desktop.  "Upgrading" winblows itself might work that way, but 
winblows without third party applications is next to useless.  Things were 
much the same way when I worked at Entergy.  They had all the money in the 
world to throw and spent a pile of it on loads of technicians who had to do 
things that can easily be automated in the free software world.  

> OCS's labs in Middleton, CEBA, and the various other buildings 
> are still MS.  They have got it down to such a science that they just
> reghost the machines remotely to take care of any issues that may 
> crop up  (not  just limited to viruses and bugs, but lack of disk space, 
etc)

That's some weird science.  I think the people at the Union and Rec center 
have it easier not having to worry.