presenting Linux to Windows admins

[Christopher Browne]

On 5/30/05, interlug-list <interlug-vSRlqIl1h/9eoWH0uzbU5w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I like your suggestion for a different audience.  Perhaps in-house,
> where the presenter is known and respected, but where Linux has been
> resisted.  I'm not willing to walk into a windows group meeting and say,
> "you are stupid because you use Windows."  These are folks that are on
> the front-lines fighting worms and virii.  They aren't asking about
> Linux because they are stupid.  They are asking because they are
> exhausted.

I do think it would be entertaining if some of the hecklers from
TLUG-land that zing off hyperbole about Windows, and who evidently
think that people that haven't already been using Linux for years and
years are stupid headed over there.  Of course, their already
self-evident lack of verbal self-control would make them show
themselves to be the asses that they are, in a regrettably wider
arena.

The folks at the "WUG" are indeed not asking out of stupidity; knowing
that they need to ask for help is a GOOD sign.  It's also not purely
out of exhaustion; it comes from the fact that they are being thrown
into needing to support some Linux boxes on their networks, and they
just don't have the time to spare to do distribution installs to try
things out to get up the learning cliff.

It's the sort of thing that a lot of VMS and mainframe folk did some
years ago; they were comfortable enough with EVE, XEDIT, and such, but
were force-fed Unix because many of their traditional systems were
getting replaced with Unix-based stuff.  They're not dumb people;
they're just accustomed to a very different set of OS customs.

A friendly helping hand can give them a big leg up.  In contrast,
throwing "their stupidity" in their faces would just demonstrate that
LUG people are childish boors...

3) In addition to 0, 1, and 2, I would think that a bit of a mention
of BASH scripting, if only from the perspective of saying that
environment things can be set in the $HOME/.bashrc file, would be
helpful.

4) Some mention of the notion that many services are managed by
editing text files would be necessary.  That suggests two further
points...

5) Simple use of version management tools (even if only RCS, which is
pretty ubiquitous) to record changes.  RCS is ubiquitous, and requires
no special repository configuration, unlike CVS/Subversion.

A quick example of "See?  this configuration was changed back in
April" would be enough to illustrate the usefulness.

6) There are automated ways of deploying configuration changes that
may even be helpful on Windows, e.g. - cfengine.  That's a talk all on
its own, but it can merit mention...
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