[wellylug] Linux admin advice

[Brent Wood]

> 
> I don't have a similar situation, but if the machines are identical in 
> hardware (or even relatively close) then they ought to have set one up and 
> simply mirrored it to the other machine. No reason to go through a lengthy 
> installation on both machines.

Agreed. But my belief is that about 2 hrs would be a reasonable time, perhaps
if they had had some problems, maybe 3-4 hrs per box. But they chose which
boxes to use and which distro, so I'm not even sure they should charge me for
any related 
problems.


> 
> Building a machine from a pile of hardware takes around an hour or two if 
> everything goes smoothly.

Systems were fully assembled (used) Compaq boxes. No time for hardware assembly
required. Just plug in screen, kb, mouse, power & LAN. They chose them from
available spare boxes.

> 
> With a good distribution like Debian, Fedora, etc, I imagine you could 
> install everything (without anything but the most basic configuration) in 
> an hour, plus download time if packages are unavailable. Even faster if 
> they've done it before and have all the packages and media on hand.
> 
> Mirroring to the second machine plus reconfiguration might take a maximum 
> of an hour depending on a few things.
> 
> That's just my opinion anyway - perhaps I misinterpreted the scope of the 
> question. An unreasonable time would be more than 8 hours for the entire 
> setup (it shouldn't take more than a day unless they've installed Gentoo).

What I am trying to do is see if my expectations are unreasonable, which is why
I didn't put the numbers in the original message.


FYI, they claimed 20 hours total to do it with Ubuntu on the two systems, which
was the distro they preferrd to use. They said pretty much- that is how long it
takes to do it properly.

My feeling is that they are claiming at least 3x and possibly over 10x what is
reasonable.


Brent


> 
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> David.
> 
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