Reality check: Prohibit Macs at a University?
 

After taking a job at a major technical university in Europe I find that the administration of my school prohibits the purchase of any Apple computers. Only PC's can be paid for using university funds. There are plenty of Mac around, of course. I have two and many faculty and students are using them. But the official (unpublished and not widely known) rule is that only PC platforms are acceptable -- ostensibly because 'support' for more than one platform is too taxing for the staff.

Does anyone out there have similar experience -- either with PC-only or Mac-only schools?

Thanks!

Not directly, but my dad works for a university in OR that dragged their feet when he got an iPad. Apparently they needed to verify that it'd be safe to let on their network. I get that they might want to be safe about things to make sure it wasn't going to expose some incompatibility and bring down the network, but it took quite a while before they allowed it on. Some of that may have been my dad just not being familiar with how to add the device himeself. I'm not sure if there was any sort of MAC registration that actually required NetOps support.

I dunno about schools - but it is very common with companies in general. My solution has to simply been to buy/bring my own - which is fine because I prefer my own tools no matter what the job is.

That works, as long as company doesn't prohibit you from connecting your machine to its network, and if it does, then it doesn't prohibit you from transferring stuff on a thumb drive, working on the Mac, and then transferring it back, and then, even if it does, they don't dictate that work must be done using something like Visio - which is Windows-only. Sure, you can run Windows on a Mac - but then you have not really gained anything - you're still stuck with working with crap. My plans with my current employer are short term for this reason.

It's funny how the while "embrace diversity" mantra doesn't seem to extend to the use of technology.

My employer was in that mode until recently. Pressure from the user community was building monthly for Mac and Linux support. Macs are finally support, even offered for us in the field as our work system. Linux - not yet.

That sounds like they have a contract with someone that includes generous kickbacks. You are probably also restricted at the bookstore - you have to use textbooks from a certain publisher?

Wow....jump right to the conspiracy theory.

No need to make it so complicated when a much simply (and likely) theory is available.

How about simply, "The dude making the decisions is lazy and doesn't want to do any more than he has to, and can get away with it." Seems apt, esp. in a place that lacks a profit motive, which would be the case if the OP's university is state funded.

What conspiracy theory? Bulk-order discounts are commonplace, and an even bigger discount is also commonplace if the client signs an exclusive contract. I used to have several suppliers that had this agreement with FedEX - they got nearly 80% off regular overnight service if they a) used a medium box, b) entered the data on the FedEX website and c) didn't use anyone else, including USPS. Not sure how the last bit was regulated.

If you think a "kickback" and a "discount" are the same thing.........I dunno what to say.

You're welcome to put quotes around either word as you see fit. Won't bother me in the slightest.

To my opinion there are no ethical big corporations. They would not be big and corporations otherwise. Greedy sharks.

Aha! I have wondered about that most of my life!
Being both big, and a corporation determines that your company is unethical..

That's a tad bit oversimplified, don't you think?

As a fully cross platform System Admin i understand why not to have Mac's on your network littering your Windows/Linux/NAS shares with special folders, ._ files, etc.
It is all fine if your shares on a Mac Server on HFS+ but mostly every site in the future will not be using Mac Servers as a primary storage system (cough) or a primary server system in the future. I for sure will not be installing any Mac Servers unless a fully Mac Shop and <50 Users. I for one will be glad to see the back of Open Directory in my larger deployments!

But overall i have to deal with it ;-) and Mac's are allowed as i work in private sector and in Media related industries. I really wish Apple would fully draw a line under there bloody resource forks and xattr system. I am currently in the process of moving a data between RAID's and "funnily" enough all the issues for copy problems are related to the old Mac files that are split !

I think i have found my robocopy nirvana now to deal with it !

My usual response there is "Mac users have been dealing with thumbs.db and autorun.inf for years without any problems, are you trying to say that Mac users are smarter?"

They usually go away at that point.

It is my opinion and obviously there are variables but overall in open market you can not grow big and specially corporate without making decisions that are not based on ethics but your shareholders expectations rather.

Well my overall point is not every bloody file is forked believe me....it is a huge PITA. Thumbs.db and autorun.inf are nothing compared to the chaos caused by ._ files.

I am not saying that Macs are bad just how much chaos they cause in a multiplatform network environment :-) there are many issues to deal with as far as Active directory integration which you have to jump though hoops to keeps working in many environments and system updates that break it.

FedEx and UPS (and I assume DHL as well) base their discount rates for a single entity on the amount of products shipped through them. If you ship, say, 1000 packages a day, and it all goes to FedEx, then you get the lower rate that recognizes 1000 packages per day.

If, on the other hand, you split that up, to 300 packages a day on FedEx, 300 packages a day on UPS, and 400 packages a day on USPS, then your discount rate on both FedEx and UPS is MUCH MUCH lower. (USPS won't change--they do it differently.)

So, it's basically true that someone can get 80% off overnight service if they ship enough packages through FedEx, and there is a strong incentive to ship everything over a single carrier in order to keep rates low. What is not true is that if someone requests a single package to go through UPS instead, that that would somehow void the contract with FedEx and make the 80% discount go away. It wouldn't at all--FedEx is not that petty, and can't be. It's only when FedEx sees that the overall quantity of packages shipped through them goes down significantly when a large portion of the overall business starts moving through someone else, then they would reduce the discount rate.

Trevor

They can write any contract they want if they can get a customer to sign it. A term I have seen for several types of good and services is "we are your exclusive vendor for XX." If that's what your central ordering or shipping department signs, that's what they tell the rest of the organization and that's what we would have to use if we wished to use the in-house service. An individual office could privately decide to do something else, but they then couldn't get it charged back to our department because our business office was bound by contract to use somebody else. As it was explained privately, they (business office) really didn't care and could easily enough charge anybody's account for any service purchase from anyone, but were scared as hell of either having our amount of "official" purchases decrease enough to lose our bulk discount ("everyone loses"), or if vendor X found out that it wasn't official policy, they would stop being as generous when the contract came up for renewal ("everyone loses for a long time").

While we're on the topic, Costco has a clause in their merchant agreement that says something like "You (the vendor) will give us (Costco) your lowest price. Period. If we find out you sell it to someone else for less, we will no longer carry your products."

So, we have ample empirical evidence to show that exclusive agreements are fairly common. Therefore it would not be unreasonable to assume that Professor's University has an exclusive contract with one supplier.

Professor: Just out of curiosity, is the purchase policy "PC only" or "PC Brand X only"?

I'm not arguing that exclusive contracts don't exist. What I'm saying, and speaking from experience, is that FedEx and UPS don't use exclusive contracts to set shipping discounts.

Trevor

Wow, did I get the wrong number
 

Hey folks, I was looking just at the issue of requiring only one manufacturer's OS - namely, Windows. I didn't mean to open up Pandora's box. No one has advanced a good reason for requiring a single OS except that it is easier to support. But support organizations in universities are usually quite weak anyhow -- in fact the university I work in has exceptionally old, outdated network stuff and can barely keep that running.

I haven't gotten responses from other University people. What has been written is interesting certainly, but it doesn't connect too well to the question at hand.

I was struck by this because I am in what is supposed to be the leading technology university in a country that is supposed to be at the cutting edge of new technical developments.

I'm just surprised, that's all.

Meh - that happens a lot. No one's going to get overly upset about it. If you want to see real arguments search for `parental control`.

Anything?

.dat files. Thumbs.db, autorun.inf and .dat files. Please make it stop.

Seriously from a sysadmins viewpoint the Mac way is far more disruptive than all those windows "extras". IMO it is still a big problem OS X still using resource forks.

20 years ago, the university at which I was Dean of Engineering fussed about Macs although many of us had them. My department even set up its own AppleTalk network so we could use an Apple laser printer. By 10 years ago, there were Macs all over the place. The the School of Architecture and Urban Planning used them exclusively as did the Department of Industrial Engineering in my Faculty. Now, I'm told, they're about 60:40, PCs to Macs and the Faculty IT department is quite capable of helping faculty and students with Macs, PCs, and several flavors of Unix. Over in Architecture, they have trouble with Windows.

Seriously, if you were on the Mac side, you'd be on this side of the argument. I'm not saying that Mac spore doesn't drive you batty. I'm saying that Mac sysadmins have similar arguments about Windows.

Seriously I manage loads of mac servers, Linux servers and windows ! So Unfortunatly I know that the Mac "way" is by far the most disruptive ! When you have large storage and millions of files.....I tell ya having 50% of files forked and 5% corrupted due to being old files that will only work when placed on HFS+ you would feel my pain.

On another note who the hell is gonna run their storage off HFS+ and/or OS X. We are slowly but surely phasing out Mac servers, open directory etc in fact any primary use of X server. Fr small offices no problem but anything above 50 people and that's it you have got to be off your rocker !

Maintenance as the driver for system choices
 

Thanks all.

The theme I see running through these comments is an important one: that maintenance of medium sized private networks is challenging and that attempts to limit the complexity by adopting a single manufacturer's software platform are only partly successful.

First, the idea that maintenance is difficult and expensive in medium-sized networks. Few purchasers or users are aware of the effort required to keep private nets working and even fewer fully factor these costs into their procurement. Are medium-sized networks more vulnerable to maintenance problems? I suspect so. Small nets have good performance characteristics because they are small and (mostly) local and because COTS works well here. Big-iron networks are lifeblood for their owners and so get critical planning and maintenance assets as a matter of course.

Medium-sized nets usually result of growth-by-accretion over years and thus have legacy and modern components and a wide variety of uses and users. They tend to be cost centers for their organizations and so get minimal support until something goes wrong -- usually hitting the response-time ceiling or a security breach. But even these events don't shake out enough resource to address the problem; the 'solution' is nearly always incremental and add-on.

Second, the underlying problem will never be resolved. Instead, technological change will simply make it unimportant. In my own case, it is clear that the university is not capable of actually managing the technology it uses. Nor should it be. The idea that every institution -- even one that claims to be technology oriented -- should own and manage its own networks and platforms is simply not on. The existence of IT shops in hospitals, universities, and most businesses is an anachronism -- they are the cottage industries of the 21st century and can be expected to simply disappear over the next decade. Even the most cursory examination of the costs of maintaining a bespoke IT shop will show that, except where deep security is required, it never pays to do so. We already outsource virtually every aspect of operations at every level and web 2 is making that even easier.

The Professor