> You can talk all you want about how to answer objection A or objection B, and
> we all know that most of the answers are there and the rest probably could be
> had somehow, but until you get "mind share" of the people making the decisions,
> you're just blowing hot air at a brick wall. Putting Linux on the file server
> seems, to me, to be the way to make the inroads. Reliability is Goliaths'
> weakness.

NT/2000 isn't bad, but there are alot of bad admins out there who do some
really stupid things with it. But that's a different matter.

Yes, a file server is a good start. An apache webserver (even if it's just
Intranet) is another good one.

If you need to sell linux, let's site some MS fuckups. #1 on my list is
terminal services licensing. It's done per-seat. Idealy, I think it should
be per-server as it would make it more flexible and useful, and be more
inline with Citrix. But no, per-seat.

That's not the bad part however. By design, you need to setup a Terminal
Services License server on your Domain Controller. When a Terminal
Services client connects, a license is requested. The License Server
assigns a license, and that license is stored on the client. (dumb dumb
dumb...) To make matters worse, once a license is assigned, it cannot be
revoked, and licenses don't expire. If your client device needs to be
reinstalled, is replaced, etc. it retains the terminal service license.
The only way to get the license back is to call a MS Clearing House and
get a replacement license assigned.

A hotfix was released so that licenses we valid for a maxium of 90 days,
but it had a bug or two and was retracted. Looks like it can be downloaded
again now. But the hotfix will only apply to new licenses. The ones
allready assigned with no experiation date need to go through the MS
clearing house.

How do you know MS is too big? When they can afford to pay a clearing
house staff to take care of issues like this.

| Andrew S. Zbikowski       | Home: 763.591.0977 |
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