Business Desktop proposal, Any takers???

[Corey Burger]

Ok, I will speak from the experience of having run Ubuntu in a small
office where I built the network from scratch.

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 8:07 AM, Darryl Moore <darryl at moores.ca> wrote:
> Thank you Daniel, I didn't know that.
>
> I had previously thought that the way to do a distribution upgrade on the
> commandline was edit sources.list, then run apt-get dist-upgrade.
>
> This appears a little easier.


do-release-upgrade invokes all the magic that Michael Vogt has worked
into the update manager. This goes far beyond simply replacing the
distro name in the sources list. There are a lot of gotchas that
Michael has tested. I suggest you pull down the python source and take
a look:

Now, as for the rest:

A small business wants dependability. Everything else is kind of
secondary. If you are trying to migrate desktops from an XP/Vista & AD
environment to Ubuntu, here are the moving pieces you will need:

1. An LDAP server. Ubuntu's preferred one is OpenLDAP (single
sign-on). The big gotchas here are access to local devices. The old
method was to use groups, the new method involves udev rules. Look
this up or ask somebody.

2. A kerberos server (this allows seamless, password-less
communication within the network)

3. A backup or NFS server. There are a number of different ways to
deal with this. Be aware that if you run the whole home directory on
NFS, GNOME will freeze if it loses its connect to the NFS server.
Another option is rsync or unison, but that has the issue that it is
done once per day, rather than all the time, plus users end up having
diffent home folders and thus different settings on each machine they
move to. Lastly, you could investigate using iFolder to hold some
portion of a users home dir, either a specific folder ala dropbox or
the whole home dir. I have never tried this, so buyer beware.

Anything beyond that is pure gravy. A few other points:

1. Stay away from default "in the cloud". A lot of businesses either
will not or cannot put their data into the cloud, due to privacy
concerns/laws. There is also the reliability issue.
2. Avoid Asterisk like the plague, unless you are an expert. If you
have to use it, avoid going to copper at any point. Trust me on this.
3. Be conservative. This means use an LTS release. They are tested and
supported. You can piggy-back off all the contracts that Canonical has
to support desktops/servers and the people that they have working on
non-security fixes.
4. Accept that maybe only a few desktops are going to move. Thus
figure out how to auth to AD as well.

Lastly, avoid anything resembling a custom script as much as possible.
It is highly likely that your problem is also somebody elses problem.
If you really want to help Ubuntu on the desktop, start working with
the global Ubuntu community on solving some of these issues. Jorge
Castro, Canonical Upstream Developer Relations and a good friend, is a
good place to start. He use to run a lot of Ubuntu using LTSP authing
against AD at the Uni he used to work at.

There are a lot more things that I can't think of right now, but those
are the basics.

Cheers,

Corey