NZ school ditches Microsoft and goes with Ubuntu and Open Source

A New Zealand high school running entirely on open source software has slashed its server requirements by a factor of almost 50, despite a government deal mandating the use of Microsoft software in all schools.New Zealand government is a sucker to Microsoft. Microsoft has a long-standing contract with the national government and most planning documents for education presume an Microsoft infrastructure.

“The education space is Microsoft-focused and heavily subsidised by government,” said Patrick Brennan, lead engineer from Open Systems Specialists, which led the IT project at the school, during a presentation at Linux.conf.au in Wellington. “Every reference plan is based on Microsoft technology.”

The school’s open source implementation uses Ubuntu on the desktop and Mandriva for four key servers (one firewall, one storage and two KVM hypervisors). Mandriva was selected because of the ease of using Mandriva Directory Server to manage the school’s LDAP directory, but Brennan said either desktop or server OS could easily be replaced.

NFSv4 is used to connect users into the system, allowing them to remotely mount into their home directory on the server via Kerberos.  Applications used within the school include OpenOffice, Google Docs, Moodle for managing education content, and Mahara for student portfolios. The Koha software used by the school library was also customised to integrate more closely with the LDAP security system and to allow book recommendations. While Koha was paid to make those changes, the resulting code will be freely available to all New Zealand schools.

The school doesn’t get any credit for the reduced spending. “The brilliance of Microsoft’s business model is they get the same amount of money regardless of who uses it,” Osborne said. However, the school has saved significantly in other areas, such as not needing specialised routers to handle connections to the Watchdog system used to filter school internet connections.

It’s a wonderful move by Albany Senior High School. I hope the government will take a notice of that and the cost savings and won’t renew the contract with Microsoft when it expires. Great job Albany Senior High School.

Source: CIO.
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