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Choosing workstations

Posted on 26 Jul 2006 at 15:43

Steve Cassidy demonstrates that a little bit of schizophrenia can be a good thing when it comes to organising your network

Or to look at it another way, with all the money this will save couldn't you buy a massive network upgrade to a core Gigabit backbone and some faster servers? Wouldn't that be money better spent than buying dual-core Pentiums for secretaries who'll principally use them to watch the animated adverts on Hotmail wriggling 10% faster? Markets and purchasing rationales change by spurts and bursts, and this refurb trick can't be continued indefinitely. If, as I've mentioned above, your current stock is mostly RDRAM-equipped machines, you have a bit of a problem. I tend to throw out the scruffiest 50% and stuff their RAM into the remaining half in such a situation.

It is, nevertheless, a great way to save money that otherwise would be spent on machines that may well - due to faddish tricks and scrimping that's beyond your control - run slower than a properly configured example of their predecessor. I can hear the rumbling from computer-room basements all across the land: surely Cassidy's schizophrenia has run out of control? Isn't it better to make sure all your kit is identical for all the users? How can he preach a doctrine of hot-desking and roaming, but then advise people to segregate their kit into different performance levels?

This sounds like a well-constructed objection, but it's rubbish. Computer facilities people suffer just as badly from this schizophrenia as I do, but the difference is that they don't know it yet. A large percentage of organisations run two or more domains - sometimes many more - yet when you quiz them as to why, they can't rightly explain. These same organisations may rigidly enforce just two hardware configurations - desktops and laptops - and because the laptops are used by short-tempered mavericks the split is almost always 99:1. I suppose it's justifiable to maintain a façade of reluctance if the deviation from The One True Way is perpetrated by people senior enough to demand special attention, but I stick to my assertion that some mild degree of hot-desking within user groups is a worthwhile target to keep in mind. And Microsoft agrees with me, which is why you can have Group Policies that pertain to Groups (could that be where the name came from?)

This is a perfectly workable scheme, once you start to think of groups as being people who share a hardware configuration rather than being people who work in the same operating division, and so it's far more constructive to have a single group called Secretaries than it is to have two called Marketing Secretaries and Production Secretaries. But it's a shift in the way the network is matched to the business that many administrators will find rather uncomfortable.

We'll go a-roamin'

Roaming Profiles that move within a group of users are alot easier to maintain and account for than a giant bucket of untuned, uncontrolled Roaming Profiles maintained under the banner of soviet equality. This has become especially true lately, since several popular applications have taken to using formerly sleepy regions of the "Documents and Settings" tree to store quite large chunks of irrelevant data.

I tripped over my own doctrine recently, having set up a widespread group of roaming users on a lot of refurbished machines with smallish drives split into two partitions. Having delivered a stern lecture on the vulnerability of Internet Explorer to various infectious websites, I followed that up with a deployment of Firefox and the latest Sun Java. However, once the users indulged in a bout of reading PDF files during a visit from a wiring contractor, the combined efforts of Sun and Firefox's cache with Adobe's new-found habit of downloading updates on a user-by-user basis, added some 60MB to each user's profile directory. It took only a few weeks of these updates from Adobe, plus the guys' habit of logging into their own account whenever they take a phone call at some colleague's desk - courtesy of XP user switching - to substantially consume the smallish partitions we'd set up several years ago as a performance booster. Pretty soon, files were failing to unzip due to a lack of temporary directory free space, and page files were peaking sharply and stopping machines dead in their tracks.

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