Now, I've got a little feedback/story about getting Mageia ready to go in one of my client's offices.
Initially I had set them up with Mandriva 2011, not realizing the chaos that I was setting myself up for. Besides the horrible user interface, there were bugs and issues that Mandriva had absolutely no intention of fixing, probably due to their financial issues (or maybe that attitude was the cause of?). I spent countless hours fixing shell scripts that were carelessly left broken. The desktop would randomly crash on the users, and they were getting constant popups about things not working. In general, the Mandriva 2011 release was eating away at my authority. I visited the site to see what kind of plans they were up to, and came across some information that was somewhat terrifying - posts about 'the future' and 'decisions' containing hints at or blatant statements of "we have serious money issues". The last straw came when they released Thunderbird 10.0.1 I think it was.. it would crash when printing, and as this is a real estate office they do a lot of printing. I had been using Mageia as a test run on my work computer, so I decided that it was time to suck it up and spend however long it was going to take to get off Mandriva and onto something that seems to have a bright future.
Thankfully, that amount of time was pretty minimal.
The office setup is fairly simple.
There are three Zotac machines (nice little mini-pc's) mounted on the back of their respective flatscreens.
There is a server that acts pretty much as a file server, which was initially set up with Mageia. It is running a raid5 setup on purely intel hardware. Nagios is hooked in to monitor the raid.
All authentication is done via LDAP.
There are two office printers. One is a Brother MFC-J825DW, the other is an HP Officjet.. not sure on the model.
The router runs DD-WRT and is an Asus RT-N16. DD-WRT works flawlessly (except for a slightly weak signal, but nobody really uses wireless).
There are some people who come in and use their laptops - they are considered out of scope for the office setup.
I'm currently three time zones behind the office I do the work for. Anything that needs doing has to be either easy for them as relatively computer illiterate people, or it has to be able to be done remotely.
The day of the move, I had the broker that runs the organization plug in a USB stick to one of the machines. Within 10 minutes I had a bootable USB stick with the live CD on it. One by one, the process was:
- Reboot the machine and enter bios.
- Change the boot order so the USB stick will boot first (necessary for the Zotacs for some reason)
- Start the live CD
- Enter appropriate information
- Install to hard disk
- Use entire hard disk when it asks what partitions to use.
- Remove unused packages.
- Wait.
- Finish and reboot.
- Add a local user when it asks.
- Log in as the local user.
- Enable and start SSHD using the control center.
- Allow ssh connections using the control center.
- Done.
After that point, I took over. All I really had to do was copy and paste a few configuration files, and run a couple programs. Within about 45 minutes of starting a machine, the machine was all set up with an NFS4 mount to the server, all authentication via LDAP, Webmin installed (come on, who doesn't like webmin
), firefox and thunderbird installed, Adobe flash and reader, java, wine, and updates started. Of course, most of this probably could have been automated. But, I didn't exactly have the time to write up the stuff.. there was a small window where I could pull off the move, as most of the agents were out, and the broker happened to be in the office.
Now, I'm not going to say that I didn't run into some problems. For example, after updating, the 'right click -> actions -> attach to thunderbird email' script that I wrote up (viewtopic.php?f=29&t=1918) wasn't working due to one of the files it relies on referencing the wrong perl. Easy temporary fix, and the Mageia folks responded quickly to the bug. (https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4625)
Also, I try and keep Thunderbird up to date, so I had to install the most up to date one manually. Just a preference, perhaps not the best practice.. but at least I test for all of their day to day needs.
Last, and this seems to be a Linux-wide thing, printing was pretty low quality. After struggling with it for a couple hours, I said screw it and started a little windows XP vm on the server to route the printing through for the Brother (which is networked). Works flawlessly. Perfect prints, at a great speed. The HP's printing quality for images sucks, but I've pretty much run out of ideas on how to fix it and I don't much care since the Brother does a great job.
All this done before I had to go to work in the morning.
I'll be sending Mageia a little gift after this tax season is over with.
Thanks!
