On Mon, 30 Sep 2013 17:51:35 Peter Nunn wrote:
> At the risk of starting a thread that runs for months, how do you overcome
> microsoft FUB in the education sector.

http://progressivedirection.com/wrong-cloud-nec-ultranet-victoria

The above page is worth reading.  While there is a difference between cloud 
services and local application the same principle applies.  One issue with 
applications is licenses, if the license is determined to be invalid then 
software stops working, for example I believe that all recent versions of 
Windows make it really difficult to take hard drives from a broken system and 
put them in a working system to resume operation.

http://vaaconsulting.com/

Another issue is proprietary data formats.  If you have a corrupted NTFS 
filesystem then you will probably find it difficult to find someone with 
relevant 
skills to try and extract data.  For Linux you can directly hire people who 
have contributed code to the Linux filesystems in question (see the above for 
an example).  You can also hire people who have read the code and know how it 
works.  For example some years ago I fixed a couple of Linux systems for 
clients which had ext2 corruption that couldn't be fixed with e2fsck (it seemed 
to be a combination of a kernel bug and a e2fsck bug), I didn't have any great 
knowledge of ext2 (I've never contributed a patch) but I have read the source.

If one of my clients has a corrupted NTFS system then I know that I can't read 
the NTFS source or hire anyone who's contributed code to the NTFS project.  I 
do know people who've reverse engineered NTFS code and I could try tracking 
down contributors to the NTFS drivers for Linux, but that wouldn't be as good 
as talking to MS employees.

The same applies all the way up the stack, I've got the source to MySQL, 
PostgreSQL, and LibreOffice and I can probably hire people who have experience 
working on those projects.


Some years ago I was in the first week of a new contract when I had to track 
down a problem with Veritas VXFS corruption on a filesystem that had an Oracle 
database.  Everyone else in the sysadmin team didn't want to touch it so I 
volunteered (it was one of those jobs where you get 1 month's pay and a 
security escort out of the office if you mess up).  Fortunately VXFS mostly 
fixed 
itself (the Veritas support people weren't very helpful) and then Oracle came 
good once the filesystem was fixed.  But I had no good options for fixing such 
things myself.

-- 
My Main Blog         http://etbe.coker.com.au/
My Documents Blog    http://doc.coker.com.au/

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