Windows Incompatibilities Frustrate D.C. Schools

capouch writes "The Washington Post reports that school administrators for the DC public school system are having an awful time getting their new administrative software to work properly." From the article: "'In my experience, the combination of an Oracle database, Windows operating system, Unix hardware and an Apache webserver is a bad combination,' Barlow wrote in the memo to Thomas M. Brady, the school system's chief business operations officer. 'In fact, through our research the last few days, we have found an advisory on the Apache website that states, 'Please note that at this time, Windows support is entirely experimental and is recommended only for experienced users.' The Apache Group does not guarantee that the software will work as documented or even at all...Barlow said officials plan to replace Windows with a different operating system."

That's What They Get...

...for not properly researching what they were going to use. A little time before can save a lot of time after.

Re:Some windows problems

The configuration is time-consuming and error-prone

What the fuck are you talking about? The configuration is the same as it is under Unix.

The PHP-monkeys make sure the Windows-binaries are released at the same time that the source is released, to make their Windows-audience feel like they are worth something.

MySQL is just a bad database.

Re:Some windows problems

It's can be a real problem to set up Apache on Windows.

Actually, with the current installer, installing Apache on Windows is brain dead easy. Getting MySQL (4.1) running under windows isn't rocket science, but getting PHP (5) to talk to MySQL in that environment is a pain the first time or two.

Re:Some windows problems

Quite true. But once you've done it at least once and distilled the actual need-to-do tasks from the process, it's about a 15-minute job.

1) Install Apache with the MSI installer. Do not reboot (it doesn't ask, so no problem).
2) Install PHP from the ZIP archive. Just unzip it to C:\PHP (or C:\PHP5 for even less config editing)
3) Install MySQL with the MSI installer. DO NOT REBOOT (yet).
4) Run through the MySQL Config Wizard when asked (at the end of the install).
5) Set the DocumentRoot and any VirtualHosts you want in the Apache config. It works just like other platforms.
6) Copy and rename the php.ini-recommended file to just php.ini. Set the doc_root and extension_root (extension root should be "./ext") settings, and uncomment (remove the semicolon) "extension=php_mysql.dll" and uncomment or add (if it's not there) "extension=php_mysqli.dll".
7) Find the PHP install.txt file. Find your system/HTTP server/version combination and add the lines they say to the end of the Apache config. There should be 2 or 3 lines. A copy/paste will suffice.
8) Right-click My Computer, click Properties, click the Advanced tab, click Environment Variables... Now, on the bottom half of the dialog box are the environment variables for everyone (your user-specific ones are at the top). Find the one called "PATH" (not case sensitive, but is usually all upper-case) and add ;c:\php (or php5, if you named it that way).
9) Reboot. The environment variables aren't updated unless you reboot.

It's not a walk in the park, but after the first time and figuring out just where stuff is, it's pretty easy for a techie. Another note: I added stuff about VirtualHosts in Apache above, but didn't mention that you'll need to set up DNS entries or mess with your hosts file to get those to work. You can just skip the VirtualHosts if you don't know how to configure them. The rest of it will still work.

Re:That's What They Get...

That's government purchasing for you.

Oh, you have no idea!! My district for example, decided that the "best combination" was novell servers and windows98. Plus, at the very time the industry was going to blade servers, they were going to "fewer, more powerful" servers. of ocurse, the lady in charge of this retired the next year!! Now, every win98 box was loaded with anti-virus, admin software, lockdown, etc. they ran so sloooooooowwwwwwwwwww. and crashed 2 ways: regularly and consistently.

Later, we needed digital school money. We needed to have X computers per student, so what did they do? they went out and bought literally hundreds of P120's and P100's with 32MB ram, most of which ended up collecting dust in some back room in schools.

the decision was made, because of funding, to go with 98 instead of 2000, because the hardware requirements were too great for 2k, but when you ocnsider the extra costs of additional software, admining them, etc., it turns out that it's far more. instead of buying better hardware up front, they bought crap and piled crap upon crap.

now, as for overall school buying, here's the deal. you never come in under budget 'cause next year you'll get less. you always spend eevrything, bo over budget, get too little, then demand more next year. in fact, if principles have extra funds left over, they find dept chairs, etc., and see what they need. you can't have leftover money. eevry public school does this, even colleges. One of my profs in grad school told us he has list on excel that is rarin' to go as soon as the school year's up. he advised us to do the same.

I mention this because it is your tax dollars and your schools. I just teach in one of them. You need to stay on top of your school boards, especially those of you with tech savvy. Let them know (since they are elected) that they can't let the districts do stupid tech things.

Re:That's What They Get...

Let them know (since they are elected) that they can't let the districts do stupid tech things.

Hey, I'm still pissed off about the fact that we had those stupid scissors that couldn't cut anything in grade school. I mean, they were about as sharp as a basketball.

Plus, for some insane reason, most of them were left-handed.

Re:That's What They Get...

now, as for overall school buying, here's the deal. you never come in under budget 'cause next year you'll get less. you always spend eevrything, bo over budget, get too little, then demand more next year.

Newsflash!

This is how it works in any large organization, state or commercial. Anytime there is a disconnect in the feedback loop such that conserving money does not directly benefit the person who makes the decision to conserve, you will see that kind of behaviour.

Heck, it is even the primary reason that health insurance premiums keep increasing - people pay a fixed monthly fee regardless of how little or how much treatment they receive. So of course they will opt for the maximum amount of testing and treatment because the additional costs do not come out of their pocket - they already paid the premium before the costs are incurred. It only affects them at the next annual premium increase and then their personal decision to max-out the available treatments is just a drop in the bucket, lost in the noise of all the other drops in that bucket from everyone else doing exactly the same thing. Just like government and corporate spending.

Not Corruption, But Poor Contractor Performance

It takes two to tango. Contractors cause more problems than their government clients.

In a former life I was a government employee deeply involved in bringing several IT systems online, from writing requirements to staff training to getting rid of something we didn't like.

Corruption of government employees was not an issue. Lack of research by government wasn't an issue.

The biggest single problem I saw was the creation of inadequate requirement specs. I saw this happen over and over for two reasons: 1) Governmenr employees lacked the technological backgrounded needed to express their needs in terms that their IT contractors could understand; 2) Contractors, especially those hired to help write the requirements, lacked awareness of their clients business needs and processes.

So, in effect, the government knew what it wanted to do but not how to translate that into a requirements doc, and the contractors did not know very much, and did not want to know very much, about the work done by their client. As a result contractors threw assorted pieces of their IT catalog against business processes they only vaguely understood.

I don't know how it works in DC, but in my environment, it would have been the contractor's responsibility to check the Apache website for that caveat about the Windows version. That's what they're paid to do.

Re:That's What They Get...

Let's look at this article again. First, it's written by a Wash Post staff writer. What's the chance that the reporter is technically literate? This is the Post, so the answer is "virtually none". I live in the DC area and read the paper.

Technology is not an area where one should expect the Post to get the facts straight. An administrator is allowed to second guess the IT system, unchallenged. "[Tut, tut,] in MY experience ... UNIX hardware ...". Really? Pray tell, what is UNIX hardware? (Given that it's an OS and runs on most everything.) But does the reporter pin them down? NO.

Relying on an incomplete and inaccurate source (the Post article) means that all the chest thumping here on Slashdot is pointless. We don't really KNOW what the facts are. We don't know the actual situation.

Can you run Apache on Windows? Of course you can! But there isn't enough proper information in this article to know where the problem lies. It might just be that whoever setup this system, or the administrators of it, don't have it properly configured.

Then again, this is the DC Public School system. This could very well be as big a CF as the article implies. Possibly worse.

Wha?

"Unix hardware"?

Re:Wha?

optical mice are considered "eunuchs hardware" because they lack balls.

Oh wait, the spelling, nevermind!

No doubt

UNIX hardware, Windows OS, Apache, and Oracle a bad combination?

No doubt they are trying to run Windows Server 2003 on a Sunfire cluster with Oracle and Apache running on it.

No wonder they are running into trouble....

It sounds like he went to a DC school

The experimental warning applied to older 1.3.x versions and systems running Windows 9x/Me.

Problem is with Unix hardware

Obviously, they should be using Linux hardware.

Re:Problem is with Unix hardware

That's GNU/Linux hardware to you, pal!

Wait...

A different operating system that is NOT Windows...?

How long until Microsoft swoops in with salesmen and faulty TCO numbers to convince this county's school board to go all-MS?

After all, there wouldn't be these problems if the schools were using Windows XP workstations accessing MS-SQL servers running alongside Windows Server 2003 Enterprise IIS webservers. Right?

Because we all know it's cheaper that way, right? Right?

Re:Wait...

I know you're joking, but I'm going to repeat that point seriously.

What's with the inflammatory headlines? It's not Windows per se that's causing the incompatibilities, just that the system's too heterogeneous. If they went with a regular Windows + Windows Server domain + IIS + .NET solution, they would've had fewer problems than they do now. Same with using an all-*NIX solution as they plan to be looking at.

I'm not suggesting that an MS solution would be better. And I'm definitely not suggesting that monoculture is the answer. All I'm suggesting is that when two things are incompatible, Slashdot has a nasty habit of jumping to the conclusion that the MS side is the problem and we need to switch to an open-source utopia. Of course, MS may very well be the problem, but you can't make such a conclusion without enough evidence - which there wasn't.

And what's with the color scheme in apache./..org? Is this Mardi Gras Slashdot or something?

Poor Management and Poor Project Management

In my experience it is more often bad management that causes problems, regardless of the underlying technology (good or bad).

In other news...

Inexperienced IT professionals find it frustrating setting up systems they have never set up before...

Dog Bites Man...

And the Sun will probably come up tomorrow... God willing.

Stayed tuned for more "News for Nerds... Stuff that matters."

Don't worry, the district is on top of it

After all, they've got a Chief Accountability Officer:

Meria J. Carstarphen, the chief accountability officer, said that D.C. STARS has great potential and that some of the glitches are attributable to long-standing problems with the city's technology infrastructure.

I think that tells you something about the structure of the DC school district. A chief accountability officer? WTF? Is this because the other O-level folks don't have to practice accountability, or is it because they're simply used to having to defend themselves against charges of incompetence?

They've frequently had problems getting the school year to start on time. Back when I lived in DC, it was because of asbestos in the buildings, but there have been other reasons.

The city government as a whole has been a joke for as long as anyone can remember, so it's probably unfair to blame the school district alone. But somehow this late discovery that Apache really doesn't work best with Windows doesn't surprise me, given the source.

How much time and money?

How much time and money did they spend on a system without, apparently, having first determined if the various bits would play nicely together? How did they manage to get to the point of going live without testing? Why did the CIO discover fundamental issues only after system failures? Just who are these folks and why do they still have jobs?

more info please

Ok,
they are running apache on windows I guess then? And that's the problem? Why are they running windows on "Unix Hardware"? What is "Unix hardware"? I can only assume they mean a Sun box? I didn't know Windows had a sparc version! I bet that's really awesome!

Anyway, from reading the article I get the impression that neither the interviewer nor the people interviewed have enough technical background to describe the problems accurately, much less fix them. The people interviewed are all managers who probably don't know the difference between c++ and VB, couldn't tell you what an OS actually is, or understand the difference between hardware and software (apparently).

In short, the story is that some managers who don't understand technology and were trying to deploy an apparently advanced web service for an entire school district never bothered to read the documentation of the software they were deploying, and then ran into trouble... I guess that's interesting, or news, or something..

Leave it to Slashdot....

Leave it to Slashdot to take an article that shows complete incompetency on the part of the journalist and those interviewed, and make it a problem about Windows.

dumbness all around.

Since all the posts were focusing on the "windows and unix hardware" bit I figured I'd RTFA (yeah, I'm new here, why do you ask?) and get the whole story. seems to be a lot of stupidity all around. A few bits:

"In fact, through our research the last few days, we have found an advisory on the Apache website that states, 'Please note that at this time, Windows support is entirely experimental and is recommended only for experienced users.'..."

And the DC admins installed it anyway because...?

"...The Apache Group does not guarantee that the software will work as documented or even at all."

I think you'll find similar words from Microsoft regarding all of their products, and most software from most vendors in general. There are no guarantees in life, period. Software companies just spell it out. This is as amazing a revelation as the "Caution: risk of electric shock, injury, and death" label on my toaster.

"We've been down for three days," said one secondary school principal, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of concern that his comments could get him into trouble. "I've sent my attendance counselor down to the central office to see if she could input today's attendance. She said they couldn't do anything." ... "D.C. STARS is not a broken system," Brady said...

Typical political bullshit. Refreshing to see it alive and well in yet another school district.

...Still, he added, "We're going to come up with a game plan to improve the system for school administrators in D.C."

Reminds me of "My client did not kill his wife, but if he did, he had a very good reason." Uh-huh. "It's not broken. On a related note, by sheer coincidence, we're going to improve it. But not because it's broken. No-sir-ee."

"Instead of the technology helping, it could be a hindrance," Roy said.

If you've got shitty admins (or, benefit of the doubt since it's school/gov't work, admins who are being asked to do way too much with way too little) then yeah, that's how it goes. A car can be helpful or kill you. Depends on how much you know.

Re:Windows incompatibility?

This is /.

Windows is ALWAYS the problem.