Just out of idle curiosity, I have a question for you guys that work in the IT field. Lets say there is this company that consists of roughly 20 employees. Each has their own windows XP machine. There are a few network printers, and a linux (FC1, say) server. The server runs samba for file sharing among the XP boxes (just one big mount where everyone shares the data, everybody has read-write access), apache and zope for the website, and mysql as a database. How much would be reasonable cost for such a setup? What about maintenance costs?

11/25/2005 8:04:27 PM

if you don't know you aren't equipped to take this on

11/25/2005 8:19:36 PM

if you don't know you aren't equipped to take this on

11/25/2005 8:27:19 PM

"Reasonable cost" with respect to time, money, security, etc.? "Maintenance" ... what does that cover?

The simple answer is "it depends" ... and the "it depends" list can fill up 5+ pages in a thread.

11/25/2005 9:34:18 PM

there is no such thing as reasonable in IT

its either freeware or fucking outrageous

11/25/2005 9:35:55 PM

Give your client(s) to me.

OR

Dont use linux, even for 20 employees, the administrative costs for setting up, and maintaining (and if you dont maintain/recommend maintaining, you suck) will be more than they will want to pay you and it will become a pay in the ass for you.

Just give your client(s) to me, thanks.

11/26/2005 12:14:56 AM

$50,000

[Edited on November 26, 2005 at 12:59 AM. Reason : sdf]

11/26/2005 12:58:13 AM

if you don't know you aren't equipped to take this on

and

Dont use linux, even for 20 employees, the administrative costs for setting up, and maintaining (and if you dont maintain/recommend maintaining, you suck) will be more than they will want to pay you and it will become a pay in the ass for you.

and

running a website internally with a 20 user domain is fucking retarded, unless you are planning on running a full t3, don't even THINK about that with ANY commercial broadband option.

and

a database on top of that, internally? So you want to put ALL their internal data, their website AND a mysql database in a single physical machine? running a base linux install? behind a consumer grade router? (and if you say oh, run the linux box as the router as well, I will fucking shoot you)

and

you haven't considered how you are going to manage 20 users without any kind of domain control?


Seriously, start WAY WAY smaller, and at least bring someone in to do this WITH you, because it will turn into a clusterfuck quickly.

[Edited on November 26, 2005 at 1:43 AM. Reason : .]

11/26/2005 1:39:06 AM

*nominates self*

resume available upon request

11/26/2005 1:54:27 AM

Quote :

"a database on top of that, internally? So you want to put ALL their internal data, their website AND a mysql database in a single physical machine? running a base linux install? behind a consumer grade router? (and if you say oh, run the linux box as the router as well, I will fucking shoot you) "

I laughed.

11/26/2005 2:46:04 AM

Quote :

"because it will turn into a clusterfuck quickly."

This is what I'm getting at.

Here's the story: I'm a grad student in physics. My job is to understand my research project well enough to write a thesis and leave before I turn 30.

At any rate, I'm the only guy in my group that has any experience with linux, and thus my advisor gave me the IT responsibilities of the group when the last guy graduated. Just to put things in perspective, my advisor has something like 20-25 employees (grad students, post docs, undergrads, etc) which is a lot for a professor in physics. Most research groups have more like 2-8 grad students. So I inherited the responsibility for a system that has a bunch of XP workstations (and one linux workstation, mine), two linux servers (one is software RAID 5 that mounts via NFS into the other which runs all of the services I mentioned in the initial post). All of the XP boxes are joined to the same domain and thus can share files on the samba share. The guy that was here before me set up apache and zope on the server, and hacked together a website on top of zope that allows users to login, look at papers that people have written, etc. Somehow the login/passwords that people have work with both the website and the domain. Also, apache is set up for virtual domains (I think thats what its called) so that the one machine can serve several different domains for all of our lab's different subprojects. I should mention that the websites aren't for internal use only. They are to advertise what our group is doing and stuff like that.

Since my job as a grad student is to understand my research project well enough to write a thesis and leave before I turn 30, I don't know how to set up a system like I just described. I don't know how to maintain a system like I just described. Nor do I want to. In fact, I don't really have any experience with system administration other than fooling around with Gentoo and OS X on my own personal machine. As you can see, I'm not at all qualified for this job.

What I really want to know is how much it would cost to set up a system like we have so that I can tell my advisor what it will cost. I don't want the responsibility for IT support that I have now, but I also don't want to wait until the server blows up/catches on fire/gets hacked/the building floods and destroys the server/sony releases rootkits for linux servers/etc. and then have him yelling at me to fix it. I figure getting some idea of how much setup and maintenance costs is a good first step in getting absolution from these IT responsibilities.

Thanks for all of the posts so far, but a quote would be much more helpful, or even just a link to the website of a company that does this sort of thing.

[Edited on November 26, 2005 at 10:31 AM. Reason : chris christmas rodriguez]

11/26/2005 10:28:26 AM

smooth, does NCSU have a central domain of some sort that these machines could be put on? What about requesting deparmental/personal space? Exchange accounts?

channel, if you haven't already, I would contact NCSU and ask what computing resources are available for faculty members. It would make things a lot easier than trying to do everything "in-house". You would also be guaranteed backup services. I would think for a university this large, they *should* have a lot of their computing services/support centralized.

[Edited on November 26, 2005 at 2:03 PM. Reason : .]

11/26/2005 1:59:50 PM

ncsu is like a giant raggedy assed quilt. there's no forest on campus per se. there are a good number of domains on campus (most are setup poorly) that you could setup a trust with. if you want something that would be easy to setup and maintain, I would suggest adding a real 2k3 domain controller. then you could push out printers via active directory, easily setup rights and synchronized credentials for accessing the samba server, have roaming profiles, etc. I'm not a big IIS fan so I would just leave webserver with apache and zope up and have it shadow the credentials of the domain controller. Or you could just have a mounted remote directory on the web server with the documents one needs to be able to access available all the time and just let the webserver handle the hosting stuff. there are tons of permutations and variations of how this could be setup, it all depends on the clients' needs and budget constraints and necessity for ease of management.

cliffs notes: there are a few ways of setting up what you want, no real "best" way, initial cost could be $0(keeping what you have in place) to ~$6000(buying a capable domain controller and consolidating a lot of stuff). the cheapest management you'll find will be ~$20/hr and you'll probably want to schedule atleast 3 hours a week(end) for someone to maintain and manage things remotely (group policy, garbage collecting, patching, etc)

11/26/2005 4:12:30 PM

The trouble is there is essentially zero institutional support for research computing. NCSU offers nothing, most colleges offer nothing, and even most departments offer nothing. They are pretty much left to their own devices, which is scary.

11/26/2005 9:31:52 PM

you guys are fucking cocksuckers man

when you know the answer to a question, you berate people

when someone asks something that google cant answer, you ignore it

thats why i usually ignore this shitty fucking section

11/26/2005 10:34:00 PM

huh. i just thought it was cause you didn't know shit about computers

11/27/2005 12:08:34 AM

^^its such a broad question with a ton of different variables

i have had to do this the hard way...call local consultants and "pretend" i am looking for their services to get a quote and from this you can kinda get a feel for the rate you should be charging.

11/27/2005 1:02:36 AM

Quote :

"if you don't know you aren't equipped to take this on"

I don't agree with this statement at all.

I could easily design, build, and maintain a large campus network that would serve thousands of network devices, but i'd honestly have no idea what it would cost, simply because I deal with the technical aspects of such an implementation rather than the sales and dollar figures. I'd imagine that there are many others with the same layered knowledge of such a process.

11/27/2005 11:18:02 AM

Quote :

"its such a broad question with a ton of different variables"

True, but I think the question I asked is probably a lot more focused than a similar question posed by anybody's (pointy haired) boss who thinks that amazon.com is written in html.

At any rate, the responses to this thread has been really helpful so far. Thanks for all of the input, and keep it coming if you have something to say.

11/27/2005 1:56:51 PM