NewsForge Secretaries use Linux, taxpayers save millions

[Monty Harder]

8/16/01 10:18:56 AM, "Jeffrey A. McCright" <jmccright2 at home.com> wrote:

>I don't understand. Unix has been running on dedicated servers for years
>(decades) with Dumb Terminals or Graphics Terminals attached. Centralized
>application management, closed systems that don't fear viruses/Crackers.
>PC's running terminal emulators. I maintained a AIX system such as this for
>a year, the hardest part of the support was a multiplexor hit by lightning,
>an employee who while watering a plant above a terminal, spilled water into
>the terminal while it was on, and fighting with SWBell over a dedicated
>lease line that wasn't working.

  Absolutely.  In our typical system, there is a SCO (or less often HP-UX or AIX) server with a 
combination of dumb terminals 
(WYSE, Relysis...) and Winboxen running either terminal emulation or the Win port of the software 
to pull the data from the 
server over the network.  By far, the biggest non-hardware problems are with the last option.  My 
worst nightmare is the 
customer that insists on having a Win server, and then decides they can install all sorts of crap 
on it. (Had one that took a 
Win98 server and "upgraded" it to ME - ewwww!) They don't know how to install anything on the Unix 
servers, so they leave them 
the hell alone.