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January 27, 2006
Network vs. Network
At faculty senate the other day the topic of StarOffice came up. It came up because nobody really understood what it was. Now I'm not going to go into any major detail to talk about it, other than to say it is a _very_ viable free Open Source option to replace Microsoft Office.... did I mention it was free?
So then the discussion went into Open Source and what exactly it was. The heart of the conversation really ended up being about providing the best computing enviornment with a shoe string budget. Using open source is certainly a great option.
The discussion however then led into Thin Clients. What they were, how they worked, how cheap they are, and how easy they are for a small IT Dept. to deploy, manage, and maintain. Then someone from the audience took a cheap shot at UCS, which I won't try to quote because I don't recall the exact words. But essentially they said, if the network is down the ThinClient is useless.
Now I say this is cheap shot because it wasn't the time or the place for the statement, or the discussion the statement really required. So that's what I'm doing now.
What exactly is a Network?
What does the average user see as the "Network"
Is it File Systems? ( h: drive i: drive for PC's or \\cougar\MyDocuments on the mac )
Is it email? Is it calendar? Is it the domain you log into? Is it wireless? is it printers?
OR
Is it the actual network, which is the wiring, and network gear that passes information from the desktops to the clients?
From a technical standpoint the "Network" is the wiring and the switches ( the Highway ) that passes traffic from point A, your workstation or thin client to point B, the servers. ( Email, File Systems etc.. ) I can say the "Network" itself has pretty much been up 99.99999% of the time over the past few years.
If you look at each individual piece of what many might call the network then they have been up about 99.999% of the time, but do _NOT_ need to be up for the thin client to work.
With the amount of reliance on things like email, file shares, calendar the internet every machine on our campus is next to useless for true work if the network is down. For the most part you couldn't even log into them.
Posted by knabet at January 27, 2006 01:25 PM