[Linux-disciples] need pithy fodder

[Stephen R Laniel]

On Wed, Dec 15, 2004 at 12:20:39PM -0800, karl sokol wrote:
> My church conference is about to implement an E-mail system.  The amount
> budgeted is server:5,386 ; Microsoft software and licenses 4,975.20 ; ArcServe
> Backup licenses 810.27 and 8,000 for labor.  Can anyone suggest a consise
> resource to submit to the task force that would thwart the squandering of our
> good people's hard earned tithes on morally questionable software? 

I've been working with a small nonprofit around here for a
while now. We've got three desktop Linux machines integrated
with two Mac OS X machines and one Linux NIS/NFS server. The
latter will soon be upgraded to a Dell PowerEdge machine --
RAID hard drives, backup power supply, 1 gig of RAM, etc.,
etc. -- that costs about $3,500. Software will cost $0. We
could add in an email server (Postfix) for $0. Add in the
labor time to get it working and we're probably up to a few
thousand dollars, much of which went into learning a lot of
it as I went along. Oh, and we back everything up to the
server every night -- once again for $0. Backing up offsite
could be cheap, if we designated someone as the 'take home
the portable hard drive guy'. In that case backup would cost
as much as one (1) portable hard drive.

All told, a really good Linux installation would save you
guys around $5,700, using the numbers you gave.

What are the specs on the $5,000-odd server that you
mentioned? I wonder if you're overpaying for that. At the
very least, companies like Dell let you buy a server with no
OS installed, saving a few hundred dollars there.

Like Adam said, I'd very glad come and handle this
installation for you. Not to use L-D as an advertisement
platform, of course -- the idea is to help you guys save
money; if I can do that, please let me know.

Whether or not anyone on L-D helps with the installation,
it's certainly true that Linux would save you guys money.

If you want a quick way to pitch them, show them Knoppix. I
think what scares people away from Linux is its putative
difficulty; Knoppix quickly gives the lie to this
impression. (Adam tells me that Ubuntu is a user-friendly
distribution based on Debian, but I've not played with it.)

-- 
``I'm not up on my knitting terminology, but I assert that
  a 'uterus doll' should never, ever be made from anything
  called 'Cascade 128 Chunky'''
 -Brian Cooke, 9 December 2004