NZ School Goes Open Source Amid Microsoft Mandate 305
Dan Jones writes "Kiwis have built an entire school IT system out of open source software, in less than two months, despite a deal between the New Zealand government and Microsoft that effectively mandates the use of Microsoft products in the country's schools. Albany Senior High School in the northern suburbs of Auckland has been running an entirely open source infrastructure since it opened in 2009. It's using a range of applications like OpenOffice, Moodle for education content, Mahara for student portfolios, and Koha for the library catalogue. Ubuntu Linux is on the desktop and Mandriva provides the server. Interestingly, the school will move into new purpose-built premises this year, which include a dedicated server room design based on standard New Zealand school requirements, including four racks each capable of holding 48 servers for its main systems. The main infrastructure at Albany Senior High only requires four servers, suggesting an almost 50-fold saving on hardware requirements."
Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
There is no mandate for NZ schools to use Microsoft software. There is a collective agreement (one of many agreements, including one with Apple), and the schools have always been able to choose the software they want.
Standard slashdot bias and hype. FUD FUD FUD
Re:FTA (Score:1, Informative)
Umm not really. New Zealand like many educational institutions license Microsoft and other software on behalf of the schools to provide them with a huge discount.
For example, here in Queensland, Aus, EQ (Education Queensland) have licensed microsoft software for all schools as well as limited 'take home' licenses for staff. The end result being XP, Office and Server software costs the school less than a few dollars per machine. Given 99% of schools run MS software I think this is a pretty great deal.
- Adrian.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not There Yet (Score:3, Informative)
Re:50-fold savings? (Score:4, Informative)
I was thinking; 4 full racks is just good foresight. My office of 20 people had one full rack, and it had a display unit, a PBX unit, a 48 port switch, and the UPS near the bottom. You can stick one or two racks in a former broom closet, but if you're building at a new site, you might as well future proof it while you're at it.
The city of seattle has 400 fiber optic strands going to each municipal building, but only uses one. Does the author of this article suggest that since FiOS only sends one strand to the home, data compression has increased 400 fold since 1996? No -- it's because it's cheap, and you can future proof for only about 10% more.
I hate marketing.
Watch out for the video (Score:5, Informative)
Watch out for the video release of the presentation, including the deputy principal of the school who was there and did a bit of acting :)
Presentation details [lca2010.org.nz]
I hear the videos will be out in just over a week
The way they do filtering with NuFW is interesting - it can authorize outgoing connections based on the _application_ that is trying to create the connection, by calling back to a PAM module on the client machine. And there are rulesets depending on the logged in user group. Beats forcing everyone to use proxies.
And to clear up, by 'standard server space' they mean 4 x 12RU, they only needed to use one 12RU rack.
Re:50-fold savings? (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed. I don't know how big their network is, but I expect at least:
8 Us for Switch
8 Us of Patch pannels for Ethernet.
8 Us for PBX patch pannels
8 Us for the actual PBX + Accesories (Eg. ATAs, GSM -> SIP GWs, etc).
10 Us for UPS
6 Us for Audio system.
8 Us for Servers
4 Us for routers
20 Us for DIsplay/keyboard (2 Displays/kb on 2 different Racks)
10 Us for Power strips (across all racks)
And I'm missing a lot of things, probably.
That is 90 Us.
Off course, the first 10 or so Units in a Rack are rarely used, since they are not comfortable. If you add some space between equipments (It's good practice, also, many systems are not rackable, and they take up more space). That can take you to, let's say, 120 Us. Plus, some room for expansion.
4 Racks seems like a good setup to me.
Re:No lock-in... (Score:2, Informative)
I have worked with hundreds of NZ schools IT in my career.
I can tell you this:
The average server count is one.
The most physical servers ive seen at some of the larger schools in the country ive worked with (~2500-3000 students) has been about 25
The biggest schools in the country can function with capacity to spare on a couple of HP DL380s and an iSCSI san when managed well.
There are a lot of morons in school IT.
The networks with the happiest users use a Microsoft platform
The networks with the unhappiest users use Novell
The schools with Linux networks BURN CASH on consultants (weather they need to or not, this is what they do). This school is new as such has lots of startup funding. They claim hundreds of thousands of dollars saved in licencing yearly yet none of the windows based schools (even paying for site licencing for things such as Adobe Suite and Sibelius) I've seen spend more than about 15k/year
Posting AC for obvious reasons
Re:50-fold savings? (Score:5, Informative)
1. The school is projected to grow to 1500 pupils over the next few years
2. The server room thing was the standard said they needed 8 racks of servers, instead they just needed 4 servers taking up less than half a rack.
Re:Huh? (Score:2, Informative)
Besides, I only consider it fair
There is nothing "fair" about Microsoft licensing agreements.
Nothing.
Re:Naming (Score:5, Informative)
"Koha" is a Maori word meaning gift/donation. The Maori are the indigenous people of New Zealand, so it's a pretty appropriate name for a FOSS library catalogue system written in NZ for anyone to use freely :)
PS Slashdot ate my "a macron" character - "Maori" should have a "-" over the "a".
Re:50-fold savings? (Score:3, Informative)
I was at Linux.conf.au and saw the talk by the company that deployed the system
Rubbish! (Score:5, Informative)