Question

[Nikolas Britton]

Roy O'Grady wrote:

>At the risk of getting told to take this question elsewhere....
>
>I am a network manager for a small government. Right now, we are using
>Novell NetWare for our networking needs, but we are getting ready to try
>an open-source solution. The costs of software acquisition and
>maintenance has gotten high, and I am hoping that a migration to
>something open-source will help us stop the money-bleed.
>
>How many of you have migrated from something closed-source and
>proprietary to something like FreeBSD or linux? What problems did you
>run into? How did users react to the change? I guess most importantly,
>was it cost effective?
>
Well I manage everything computer related for a small business 
(photography & digital imaging studio) and this is what I have done or 
in the prosess of doing:

Backend (Servers & Services):

Internet Services:
Waverider 900Mhz Wireless link to Internet, This is essentially a 
wireless T1 and works great for $60/m.
For the Firewall I picked m0n0wall (http://www.m0n0.ch/wall/), m0n0wall 
is a FreeBSD based embedded firewall/gateway/router package that can do 
just about anything without a lot of fuss. I evaluated lots of the linux 
based ones but they never seemed to work quite right or where high 
maintenance from an administrative prospective. I used an old pc, 
m0n0wall, and 3 new intel pci NICs (LAN, WAN, DMZ for 802.11 AP) for a 
total cost of $60.

Servers:
Are server needs are currently simple and we only have one NT4 server 
box on the network to proform file server and PDC functions but this is 
changing shortly as we are in the middle of switching to FreeBSD to 
handle are future needs, that being, running a custom build web based 
CRM, workflow/tracking, scheduling, inventory, and groupware 
applications using PHP, Perl, MySQL, LDAP, and Apache. I decided on 
FreeBSD for many reasons but the biggest reasons are:

1. Its free.
2. I found it to have the best documentation of all the free unix 
projects (*BSD, Linux, etc), coming from a DOS/Windows background this 
helps a lot when you have to relearn everything.
3. FreeBSD as a System is very well thought out and controlled, it "just 
works", as apposed to linux (and windows) witch looks like a big chaotic 
mess from my prospective (see 2).
4. The FreeBSD ports/package system (see 2 and 3):
5. By Using *BSD you are still able to support the FOSS and Linux 
movements, I would really love to see Microsoft et al. knocked down a 
few pegs.
6. The *BSDs are rock soild systems that work like running water, they 
cant be beat: http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html

I just bought 3 used IBM Netfinty 3500 servers (PII333Mhz, 256MB Ram), 
the plan is to scrap two of them for parts/spares and turn the one left 
over into a Dual PII333Mhz system with 512MB Ram. This box will be more 
then capable for the job with FreeBSD/Samba/MySQL/PHP/Apache/etc on it.

The 3 servers where $90/each, FreeBSD, Samba (Windows File Sharing, 
PDC), MySQL (RDMS), PHP (Server Side Scripting), and Apache (HTTP 
Server) $0, total cost $270

I am also entertaining the idea of a terabyte sized RAID 5 array for 
image archival, currently we burn them to CD and have all types of 
problems with this. I don't want to go into the details of this but the 
plan is to have the RAID array on the main server and have a normal PC 
Offsite (80 acre farm with many buildings on it) with  a 802.11 link and 
a few IDE drives merged into one volume so we can have a backup (ig. 
rsync) of the RAID array if we ever have a fire, lighting strike, etc. 
The Projected cost for this project is less then $3000 with the help of 
FreeBSD and friends, and off the shelf computer parts like IDE Hard drives.

*Forgot to say that email services are going to be takin over by the new server with an IMAP web based mail client and sendmail et al. on the server...sendmail et al. $0, MS Exchange $???

To anwser your three questions: 
1. Just trying to relearn everything the UNIX way.
2. The network and backend is transparent to users.
3. Yes!

Desktop:

Workstations:
There are no plans to move to linux/bsd on this front until adobe ports photoshop et al.
There are no plans to upgrade from windows 2000 to XP etc.
When Win2k support is drop by Microsoft (2006ish I think) I will reevaluate are options if photoshop isn't ported yet.

Office PCs:
Keep using Windows 2000 untill its droped by microsoft then Convert them to FreeBSD or Linux.

Applications: 
Cross platform apps are are my first picks so we can stay flexible when the desktop linux movement takes off (2005 - 2006). 
With the release of OpenOffice.org 1.1 I removed Mircosoft Office 2000 from all the computers because most of the installs where not licensed anyway. the users didn't have a problem with the software or having to learn it but with the change in general and have gottin over that. we have simple office document needs so coverting are old MS office docs to OOo wasn't a problem. the cost of an MS Office license is $500-$1000, the cost of OOo is $0.

I also replaced and removed Internet Explorer with Mozilla 1.4.x, again users where apposed to the change but after the fact liked Mozilla better then IE because of the tab browsing, pop-up blocker, etc. Mozilla $0, IE $0, Not having to deal with Spyware, pop-ups, Viruses, etc. $Priceless.

Also with my focus on server based web apps mozilla will become the platform the user interacts with and the operating system we run mozilla on is unimportant as mozilla runs on just about anything, i.g. no software vender lock-in and no hardware platform lock-in. ditto that for OpenOffice, FreeBSD,and Linux.

The Audacity Project (http://audacity.sf.net) looks to be a very promising one. I am currently testing 1.2.0-pre3 for are audio editing needs and it works great.

I didn't include the costs of time/labor, support staff retraining, building custom apps etc. because those are dependent on other things.

This link should help you with all the details: http://news.osdir.com/article292.html

>
>Thank you in advance for your opinions and time, and if this question
>is inappropriate for this list, please accept my apologies.
>
>
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Hope this help
/Nikolas