Discussion on:

Linux plus recycled hardware equals serious savings

Of course being a technical trainer this is the first thing I think about

Didnt you have to train everyone on the new email system and train everyone on Star Office ? I know star office has its simalarities but thats a big jump in software .Carl Hall

I took a data entry person at my old job and taught
them to use StarOffice to edit Excel spreadsheets.
Our company was strapped for cash and I asked
them to let me give SO a go instead of having to
license another Office 2000. As we added data entry
people later, I just kept installing StarOffice. The files
translated smoothly and the product manager who
reviewed the data before import to the database was
using Office 97.
And as for using Sendmail vs. using Exchange,
sending e-mail is sending e-mail. Most small
companies don't use the scheduling part of Outlook
(and it sounds like these guys were more the Outlook
Express variety).
Even Linux isn't so hard to use. When friends come
over, they are able to usemy system with a minimum
of help. As soon as I tell them the K with a gear is
just like their Start button, they're off and running. (If I
used Gnome instead of KDE, it'd be a paw located
there, but still act just like their Start button and
they'd probably still have no problems using this
machine.)

Just because you have a different server, doesn't make anyone's client need to work differently. As long as everybody's network settings are correct, you'll be able to send and receive with Outlook, Messenger, Eudora....whatever you want. The new server would be transparent to the users.
Now the switch to StarOffice might be a little different, but the people who really knew how to use Word and Excel shouldn't have any problem figuring out the differences, and the people who only used it totype the occasional letter won't need to.

I don't want to discount the importance of training too much; there's too darn little of it, regardless what operating system is being used. But I can't remember the last time I worked for a company who had ANY formalized computer training for office suite applications like MS Office. IOW, I'm not sure it makes any difference.

Companies change ERP software all the time. Users usually don't like it, but they will (usually) eventually accept it. I suppose the same would happen with an office suite switch.

But are you not a little worried about getting paid on Thursday????

My thoughts exactly. This place sounds like a nightmare to work for. The CEO expects the job to get done but doesn't want to pay for anything. I admit that I've scrounged around for hardware now and then but give me a break! If they can't spare a little money for such important projects, then I'd be scared to work there. It also scares me that this is a health care company. Good job, Mike, but how do you put up with it?

Finally, Tech-Republic publishes something that resembles what so many of us out here in the real world do. Most companies that I work for have fewer than 10 computers on their networks. They are sensitive to every dollar that I spend on hardware and every dollar that I charge. If I want them to do an upgrade, I have to "sell" them every dollar's worth based on the "return on investment", the ROI that everyone is always talking about. Very seldom is the hardware namebrand and almost never is itconsistent. Odd pieces here and there. So, while you are worried about your "nightmares", many of us are saying, "this is where we live".

Mike may be struggling in corporate USA but here in Africa these money saving tips can make a huge difference to organizations that have to worry where they will get windows, doors and water - not Windoze, Gateways and pipelines!
Ther are many organisation doing life critical work that could benifit big style from having acces to computer and internet technology

It can be frustrating not being able to just order all the latest and greatest new toys. But I also really enjoy the challenge of having to come up with other solutions.
I had a similar boss and 3+ years ago had to get internet e-mail and internetaccess for one of our offices for $0 beyond the monthly cost of an ISP. Network was a Netware 3.12 server w/ mixed Dos, Win3.1, Win95 clients. Took the "guest" computer (P-75) and installed Wingate as the gateway. (Wasn't familiar w/ Linux at the time.) Used Mercury as the Mail Transport Agent and Pegasus as the e-mail clients as it had both Dos and Windows versions. Saved mucho bucks not having to buy Novell software. BTW, the computer still functioned as the guest computer as well.

I know what it is to work for a company that has little money for technology and I also understand how strange it sounds for someone used to work on a more wealthy company.

At my previous job we lived that reality and it worked!, not perfect, but the work was done. The point was that only one guy knew what to do when something failed!

Having just moved to a bank, now I have the daring possibility to present a sound (and expensive) project and money eventually comes (what is new for me .

Anyway, I'm in process of retiring old servers from production, rebuilding them more powerful (one from two) and putting them back to work for not so critical processes.

So after reading your article I'm beginning to feel in heaven (hope it last).

Regards,

Julio

This is the second 'story' from this Mike guy. Who actually writes these things? Bunch of propaganda if you ask me.

Why does it have to say that Windows 98 wouldnt work with that hard drive? Why cant it just say that he got a hard drive for free?

Maybe you should find a job thats not located in an ivory tower. This is reality for a lot of us out here. Linux works on old hardware & old hardware is dirt cheap. End of discussion. Thats fact, not propoganda.

Good work Mike.

Where do you find out about liquidation auctions.

with various computers running windows what client was used to work with sendmail? and how was it done? Your help will be much appreciated.

Sendmail is an SMTP server. You can use any
standard e-mail client... Outlook, Outlook Express,
Netscape, Mozilla, Pegasus, Eudora, GoldMine, Act,
or Forte Agent to name just a few. It doesn't require
any special settings on any of the programs to use it.
Just put the Sendmail server's address into the mail
settings (and username/password if required by the
program).
There's a good chance that if you've been with more
than one online service during your use of the
Internet, you've sent your e-mail out through a
Sendmail system. The beauty of that was that you
didn't need to know it was a Sendmail system. (And
I don't know any ISP that runs Exchange for its dialup
users, not that they aren't out there.)

Sendmail is not really an "SMTP server". It
is a mail transport agent which uses SMTP to
send or relay messages across the internet.
It is also an "SMTP receiver" which has the
ability to receive mail messages coming from
the internet using SMTP.

It is not a server to those e-mail clients in
the way Ryan suggests. It does not deliver
mail messages to them. Netscape, Eudora,
Windows Messaging, etc., are all POP and/or
IMAP clients. They do not speak SMTP and do
not communicate directly with the sendmail
program or daemon. As far as I know sendmail
speaks only SMTP and does not function as a
POP or IMAP server.

There is probably a POP (or IMAP) server on
the mail server machine. Sendmail receives
incoming messages using SMTP and deposits
them in users' incoming mail directories
on the server machine. Then the POP
(or IMAP) server takes over and serves
those messages to those client mail programs
on users' client machines.

TR is right. Sendmail sits "beneath" whatever POP/IMAP server you run to talk to the clients. Though I stand by my use of the term "server" since server doesn't mean send only. Yes, Sendmail receives as well and then delivers those messages to a pre-defined location for storage until a client connects to the pop or imap server to pull those messages. (Yes, I know there are also mail clients that access the drops directly instead of requiring an intermediate server.)

So I should have saidthat Sendmail + POP/IMAP server looks the same functionally to the typical client as MS Exchange's e-mail capabilities. (HP has a server that can imitate the e-mail *AND* calendaring capabilities of Exchange on Unix, but MS appears to have pressured them into dropping it.)

...although, loosely speaking, calling it an
"SMTP server" can convey roughly the right
idea. Just not literally. I wanted to make
the technical distinction clear so as to
avoid confusion for the person who was
asking advice on how it was set-up. The
advice given by Ryan was essentially
correct, assuming the POP/IMAP server got
installed automatically, or installed
intentionally by someone when the mail
server was set-up. Then it will indeed all
be transparent to the end user.If you forward outgoing mail to the machine
running sendmail because the client machine
doesn't support SMTP directly, then it is
closer to an "SMTP server" since it is then
providing "SMTP services" (mail transport
services) to that client.When I think of "
server", I think of a machine providing some
service to a client, where is the language of communication.
In the case of mail retrieval by the end
user, POP or IMAP is the language of
communication between the two machines.

Chances are they installed not only sendmail but also a POP3 server on the mail box. Then you can use anything from Outlook express (probably already installed on all the machines) or find another mail program.

We use Pegasus Mail (new version comming out soon) rather than outlook to avoid all the outlook virus on the loose. Plus it's free!

it works really cool. You can use any browser. I don't know how to set it up, but, I worked for an ISP that used Sendmail for it's customers, and it worked very well.

That's a 3rd party add-on. Sendmail itself doesn't include web based retrieval. A search of Freshmeat.net will give you a list of several pieces of software running Perl and/or PHP for doing exactly what you mention.

... at least on my 5 FreeBSD and 1 NetBSD server. My main firewall gets a real work out though. That is the nice thing about Unix systems... so little overhead on the CPU that you can use those old P-133's pretty easily....

Rick

The subject of this story is lucky that his boss is open minded. If some of the larger corporations could open a crack in their thinking, there are many ways we could cut costs and increase the profit margin.
These were the tip of the iceburg. With star office, my organization could save hundreds of thousands over the course of a year, and still have the same functionality. We use HP-UX on most of our servers, and this works well. But when it comes to other services, Micro$oft abounds. Apachewould server very well over IIS on NT, Firewalls of Linux or BSDi would be a better solution than NT/2000 with another costly application running on top.
The biggest hold back for a large company is blame. Should something go wrong, the land sharks don't know who to serve a summons to, so they will never approve such a move.

It sounds to me like Mike's talents and resourcefulness are be wasted in a company that complains about a $200.00 expenditure for a firewall. While I support cost savings and getting your money's worth, it also can be taken too far. I hope they are paying you what you are worth Mike.

Mike,

First of all, unless you are highly paid, get out! I just got out of that type of environment, and I've never once looked back. There ARE still companies that will respect your talents, give you free reign and supply you with a budget to work with.

I use Linux quite heavily myself, so I know what it can do, but it would seem that even Linux cannot free you from the troubles you will deal with in the future.

All that aside, I have one last question for you...why throw away the Compaq 150...it would work fine for a firewall/gateway, mail server or webserver for a company of that size. I used one for years with extremely heavy load (an ISP). Hardly ever experienced problems, with uptimes near 300 days. Seems like you may havewasted $200...

Mike,
My company is been be acquired. Meanwhile, no renewals, no upgrades, neither shopping. And regardless that I bought a very good firewall (Sidewinder), now it's obsolete. I get very interested on the firewall upon Linux you mentioned. I would like to know more about this.
Regards.
Jose-Luis.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article.jhtml?id=r00220010322pro01.htm&fromtm=e011

I am the network administrator of a small school with about 500 users and about 75 workstations. We have a real mixed bag of machines on both NT4 and Novell 4.11 networks. We were recently given old p100's with 16 meg's of RAM and 800MB HDD, but with NIC's. We decided to try to run up different flavors of Linux to see what would run the best but would not strain our already blown budget. We have tried to cut the installs down and still include some of StarOffice but with no background in Linux we are stuggling. If anyone would like to make any suggestions I am all ears.

I have no experience in Linux, but while browsing the Redhat website recently, I came across what seemed to be a starting set with guides and some sample applications.
http://www.redhat.com/software/linux/7-1_deluxe.html

I hope this is helpful.

Jeff,

Let me suggest that you take a look at the Linux Terminal Server Project. A friend and I were experimenting with that last week and it looks very promising - especially in a situation like yours. We quickly set up two clients and a server from three older Compaq PCs. We used a ROM-O-Matic Floppy instead of EPROMs. It was sweet - but slow with only 32 MB of RAM on the server. If you have a budget at all, spend it on the fastest server with the most RAM you can afford. www.ltsp.org

is that your problem is available HD space for your install?You might want to take a serious look at Pocket Linux for your situation.To Quote"Pocket Linux is an almost minimal, one floppy linux system designed to quickly convert a PC workstation into a secure linux-based workstation using ssh to connect to remote host (other networking clients are also supported). It supports bootp for determining host IP and other network parameters (there's also manual configuration possible, but bootp is recommended). In addition to workstations equipped with a network card (ethernet or arcnet), you can also use Pocket Linux on a PC equipped with a modem. Modem is automatically detected and then PPP connection is made."
http://pocket-linux.coven.vmh.net/

I suggest you check out the Linux Terminal Server Project:
www.ltsp.org.
Also take a look at K12 Linux - LTSP:
http://www.riverdale.k12.or.us/linux/k12ltsp.html. These sites illustrate how Linux can be used to provide the functionality of much more expensive NOS and apps for the cost of recycling old or discarded equipment.

Its very refreshing to see that there are still some hero geeks that believe in recycling what others consider trash. When you're up against a budget constraint, you've got to use the ole brain to survive. You can go broke keeping up with the Gates!I feel better now about retrieving older stuff and making it work again!

Had to scrap a mailserver out of the trash? The CEO gave him a whopping $200 bucks to put together a firewall? Too funny... Can you imagine what poor Mike must go through to get a raise? Update your resume Mike! There are some "real" companies out there looking for people with skills.

I think the company boss might be a little tight with
the wallet, but at the same time, people who want to
go out and get gigabit ethernet cards for their
systems (to secretly reduce their pings playing
Quake) are wasting money. A Pentium 200 or 133,
or even a 486/66 can still do everything today they did
when they were first bought. Hard drives have
physical interations and can break down, but a
sufficiently protected electronics system can run for
years without fault.
A 486 system can be used as a router/firewall for
cable modems. It doesn't require a lot of processing
power. So if you have one laying around, that and
Red Hat (or whatever Linux/BSD distro) can do a
great job connecting a home network to cable or a
work network to ISDN (did that at my last job with a
5x86-133). If you've got the equipment there and
available, you can get it set up in almost the same
amount of time as going to the store and buying a
router for home or office.(Assuming you know
enough Linux already to follow the HowTo's.)

Eventually, that Linux box was replaced with a Cisco
router (we needed a strange interface to a T-1 that we
couldn't get for a PC). The box is still chugging away
on my daughter's desk (I had loaned it to work). She
enjoys educational children's games on it now.

Mike, this is how it's done. You approached the subject with savvy, humour and intelligence. If I was in Sargent Hulka's company you would be my big toe! Ten Hut Salute and I am going to rally the troops around all of my old equipment, we are going dot com, baby!