Desktop Relevance

[Dan Ritter]

On Thu, Mar 26, 2009 at 02:54:21PM -0700, KyleL wrote:
> 
> I do agree though that if all people are using eg. browser and word
> processing that makes sense. But how do you take care of companies that have
> multiple users on different platforms for say graphic design?  Do any linux
> platforms support Adobe, or something equivelent?  These questions are for
> personal knowledge because I am curious how you would integrate these
> systems.  

Graphic design folks are mostly Mac users. They're specialists
in any company, though.

> For instance I interviewed for a job last year that had OS-X/Windows
> Desktops, 3 Linux servers and 2 running Server 2003.  It seemed like a lot
> of work for 25 hours a week to maintain all these machines for one person. 
> So how would you go about integrating all that under linux desktops.  Or
> could you?

That completely depends on what they're doing and why.

I run, let's say, a hundred or so machines along with one
assistant. Because we do things carefully and in an automated
fashion, we could scale to a thousand machines or so with just
one more person. If we didn't have hardware to worry about, we
could run pretty much any size operation 24x7 with 5-7 people.

Customer hand-holding is extra, however. The real problem is
that many businesses need onsite technical jack-of-all-trades,
and they bought computers because they were useful, not as part
of an overall plan. Eventually they grow to a point where they
need to transition to a structured plan -- that transition is
often unnecessarily painful.

You might find it useful to read up on system administration
automation frameworks, including radmind, Puppet, cfengine...
a related term is configuration management.

-dsr-




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