The Ubuntu Experiment

[Dave Woyciesjes]

Chris Jones wrote:
>> 	None of that happens here at this large University. The users just beat 
>> on their machines, day after day, no preventive maintenance on the part 
>> of IT. And they keep going. And sometimes something stops. They call the 
>> HelpDesk, we do a couple things, and about 90% of all calls to us get 
>> fixed on first contact.
>> 	Automatic reformats, at any schedule, would absolutely _not_ fly here 
>> at all. There would be heads served up on plates for that. As another 
>> data point, I have not heard of any place that has a regularly scheduled 
>> reformat/reinstall scheme in place. IMHO, it sounds like a band-aid plan 
>> to cover up a bigger issue no one has bothered to try & solve.
>> 	As for your University reinstalling once a week? I find that hard to 
>> believe. I'm going to have to through down a BS card on that. If you can 
>> prove this to me by pointing me to the ITS policy stating this, please do.
> 
> I think it is more common than you think. It also happens here at this 
> uni as well... Cannot direct you to anything that proves it, but I'm 
> pretty sure it happens. And not just for windows - The machines dual 
> boot to SUSE and they reimage that as well from time to time.
> 
> Chris
> 

	It may well be, I have just never heard of it in my experience. Yearly 
or monthly, I can see. Weekly? That would be hard, and 
resource-intensive. Depending on the numbers of machines being imaged, 
and how they stager it, you'd need _at least_ a 100mb full duplex 
network; and even with that the network could get quite bogged down.

-- 
--- Dave Woyciesjes
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 From here to there,
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