[Linux-disciples] need pithy fodder

[Adam Rosi-Kessel]

One important question here is who is going to maintain the email 
server. It's really not possible to just install a box and let it run 
on its own indefinitely. If the conference has windows admin staff and 
they plan on maintaining the server, you're going to have a much 
bigger uphill battle.

Stephen R Laniel wrote:
> 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.)
> 


-- 
Adam Rosi-Kessel
http://adam.rosi-kessel.org
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