Business Desktop proposal, Any takers???

[Darryl Moore]

Daniel Robitaille wrote:
> On Fri, May 29, 2009 at 11:17 PM, Darryl Moore <darryl at moores.ca> wrote:
>> Hi Daniel,
>>
>> I was originally going to use 8.04, but the next LTS distribution will
>> be coming out (i think) for 10.10 which will still be in the life span
>> of 9.04. So if I have to upgrade in 10.10 anyway, what does it matter if
>> I'm upgrading from 9.04 or 8.04?
> 
> like Joel wrote in that other email, the upgrade path from 9.04 to
> 10.10 will be more complex with more steps than the one from 8.04.
> 
> It also depends if you have to add to the mix for some consumer
> specific 3rd party software that may be working well for 8.04 but are
> officially unsupported for non-LTS releases.  But on the other side,
> you may run into hardware and/or software that can only run with newer
> versions than the latest LTS release.
> 
>> Besides, I've found there are so many things that just simply work
>> better in 9.04.
> 
> Some people have been running into problem with some intel graphics
> chipsets and the 9.04's Xorg.  I was one of them with one of the alpha
> version of 9.04 on this laptop (but granted, I haven't tested the
> final release to see if that got sorted out and instead reverted back
> to 8.04).
> 


Excellent points. I was originally using 8.04. There is no reason I
can't go back to that for all my testing. I still have it on my local
apt-mirror.

I was wondering about the ability to upgrade from LTS to LTS directly.
How does that work? When you run apt-get dist-upgrade, how does it know
you want to upgrade to 10.10 and not 8.10?



> 
>> Backups.
>>
>> Done nightly via rsync to a remote server. DSL will serve most small
>> businesses well for this. If they need additional bandwidth then I'd
>> install a MLPPP DSL connection fairly cheaply.
> 
> I semi-recently discovered rsnapshot to maintain my rsync's backups.
> Great little program to help maintain multiple hourly/daily/weekly
> snapshots of your filesystems, with a very optimized use of the disk
> space.  Similar to OSX's Time Machine, without the fancy but useless
> graphical interface :)
> 
> One comment about nightly backups:  works well for desktops; may not
> work as well for laptops that don't always have access to that
> friendly DSL connection; think here of someone on the road half the
> time using crappy hotel connections.  The laptop will have to know to
> only attempt these rsync backups when it is on an apppropriate
> connection.
> 

excellent. I'll look into that to.

There is no need to backup laptops or desktops. All /home directories
will be stored on a central NFS. Only the server gets backed.
Workstations have no local files.

With laptops where there may be local users, I've set it up so there is
a /localhome directory which is on the laptop. It would be easy enough
to make a startup script that rsyncs everything from the /localhome to
the /home directory when the NFS server is available.