Re: [sheflug] government open source policy

[Alex Hudson <home [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2006-03-14 at 12:16 +0000, David Willington wrote:
> > Hm, that's an interesting solution. Does that mean that the external
> > server is effectively going to be read-only, though?
>
> Interesting? That often has a double edged meaning! If you've any    
> further thoughts I'd welcome them. The plan is that if you're    
> accessing from outside school you'll access the external server and  
> if you're inside school the internal one so that loads and bandwidth
> are (to some extent) shared. 

Hmm. If you're planning on synching the servers both ways, I would
predict that will be a recipe for data loss. Notwithstanding
after-school study clubs/whatever, you can't sensibly synchronise two
SQL servers both ways (e.g., auto-enumerated fields will get screwed,
which will mean foreign keys will be jiggered), so one or other DB would
have to get blatted.

Plus, when your internet line does go down for the week, suddenly you've
got a week's worth of data on both servers. And when your sync fails,
kids have done work at home that they can't access when they get to
school. Etc. I think it sounds like a world of pain, personally :)

I would think that there are better solutions, but it depends on how
intelligent your external server is. 

> I'm sure they're not unique in being convinced they don't get the 2Mb
> access that they're expecting. When things go wrong the feel fairly
> powerless to do much about it, and automatic upgrades to pretty much
> everything they have seem to involve things going wrong somewhere.
> Coupled with being told they'll have to pay more for something they
> already thought they had and there's a mood to try open source.

It's good if they're able to make their own spending decisions; I've
heard that for many things schools are often tied into the LEA deal or
whatever, which is probably cheap but not necessarily good.

Cheers,

Alex.


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