News from PANUG/BizNix - April 17, 2003 http://panug.org - http://biznix.org THE LATEST WIRELESS Tonight is PANUG's April meeting. The theme will be the latest in wireless technologies and products. Rick Lindahl is bringing numerous products to show and tell. He'll discuss security, interoperability, distances, speeds, and many other areas of interest. There will also be two factory reps from Alvarion and RAD Data Comm. who will speak about their equipment lines and perspectives in this area as well. FEEDBACK by Ken Barber (Ken is the author of HB2892) This is in response to Ray Robert's Fedback article yesterday. I'm glad that Ray Robert has never had to deal with an oppressive boss. That doesn't mean that they aren't out there, and it does not make the Community Outreach effort "off on the wrong foot." The reality is that there is now an epidemic of pointy-haired IT bosses who don't care what the facts are, they are determined to have an all-Microsoft shop regardless of the costs or consequences. I have personally encountered at least three of these in the last year and a half, and know plenty of people with horror tales worse than mine. I was a happy network administrator at a small private college when my boss, who was supportive of Open Source, got offered a promotion. The guy that we hired to replace him quickly turned into a nightmare. Hhe had three Microsoft certifications (including an MCSE) and didn't know ANYTHING about computers, networking, or security beyond the pablum that Microsoft had spoon-fed him. We had ALREADY MADE the business case for Open Source and Unix-like operating systems there. We hadn't had a successful intrusion in two years, and even the infamous email worms (ILoveYou and its descendants) never touched us because we were running Qmail on a Linux box. Next thing we knew he was blaming our Samba server, which had worked perfectly for years, every time some little thing went wrong. He wanted to rip it out and replace it with W2K. He also announced that our Apache web server, which hadn't been hacked since we'd switched from IIS, was going back to W2K and IIS. My former boss and I had been in the habit of swapping interesting news articles we found on the 'net. But when I sent this M$ bigot an article about Linux, here was the reply I got: > We will be moving to current Microsoft opsys technology. From > my perspective, the IS team will either get on board (learning > and doing all they can to secure and administer the new > environment) or fight me all the way. A small shop cannot > afford the latter. I will not allow any individual to keep us > mired in the past by non-cooperation or constantly waving the > red flag of security. Then he fired me. He left after a few months and the new boss there, I am told, "is 4X worse." The guy who replaced me is now working overtime trying to rip out all the open-source solutions that he and I spent years engineering and perfecting, for a Win2K environment that, according to contacts in the hacker underground, have already been 0wned. [ED - The term "0wned" means that hackers have broken in and taken over the computer.] I'm glad that Ray has never had to deal with this kind of bigotry. But it's out there, and it's rampant. [ED - Critical points in Ken's story is that he had already made the business case for deploying Open Source software, it was deployed, and it was working reliably and securely before being replaced. This is not a case where, as Ray pointed out yesterday, IT people didn't make a busines case for Open Source. This is a case of a manager tearing down a working system and replacing it because of his perception that using Open Source software would have them "mired in the past". The focus of Ray's story was the opposite scenario, where companies are using commercial software and need to be convinced to start using Open Source software. The BizNix Community Outreach would address both scenarios.] DISCLAIMER PANUG and BizNix welcome contributions from all members. Member contributions do not necessarily represent the official positions of PANUG or BizNix. If you don't contribute, the views of members that contribute frequently may appear to be the official position of the group(s).