[CS-FSLUG] Microsoft Church Case Study

[Dommy E. Hamid]

Don Parris wrote:
> Anyone seen this?
> http://www.microsoft.com/resources/casestudies/CaseStudy.asp?CaseStudyID=15041
> 
> Interesting stuff.  Apparently posted last year prior to the release
> of PitP 1.0.  It appears to me that whoever setup the GNU/Linux
> infrastructure did a really poor job of designing the network. 
> Everything they mention (what's the alternative to AD? OES?) is doable
> under GNU/Linux.  And why they were experiencing network intrusions
> can only lead up to the guru not knowing security very well.
> 
> I think they replaced the wrong thing.  The church probably should
> have made sure the guy got some classes, or looked for a new IT guru. 
> I just don't see why they couldn't have redesigned the infrastructure,
> rather than replace the software.
> 
> Don

Here are my thoughts.

The guy who is doing it is fully trained in Microsoft environment (via 
Windows NT or 2000 servers). When he is doing the Linux environment, I 
have a feeling he just read a couple of books and then try to wing it. 
Hey, for all I know, the guy tried something crazy like Slackware or 
Debian :) (which is, no matter what you say, is not a newbie Linux 
distro). You cannot "wing" an environment change like that, not when it 
is so different. A lot of people who are trained in Microsoft 
technologies just cannot handle the power and complexity of Linux, so 
they went back to something they know and familiar with.

As for problems with familiarity, I even experience it myself when 
trying to configure a Fedora/RH or Suse based server while I am much 
more familiar in Mandrake. They are both Linux, but I experienced a 
degree of difficulty because I am not familiar with their quirks. Once I 
had to spend almost a whole day trying to figure out why a Suse based 
server doesn't boot up after a motherboard/cpu replacement (because I 
know by experience that Mandrake and RH should just detect the new 
MB/CPU and then after a couple of reboots at most, go on as if nothing 
has happened). I found out that Suse has the habit of installing the 
kernel that is specially tailored to the architecture (Athlon in this 
case). I had to download an emergency Suse bootup ISO (since the person 
don't have the original disks) and i586 kernel to solve that problem. 
Something like this is usually not mentioned in the books, only by 
experience.

I think AD is Active Directory, so the Linux equivalent should be 
OpenLDAP. There is eDirectory that can be found in Novell SLES, but I 
don't think it's free

I don't know what OES is. If it's Exchange, then any email server will 
do. If they require collaboration, then there is Open Exchange but I am 
not sure it is free either.

And believe me, based on the uptime in the servers between two depts 
(approaching 3 months now in Linux vs less than a day in Windows 2000), 
everyone knows which one is more robust.

Dommy
---
[This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]