Skippy's project <OT>

[Stuart Biggerstaff]

Sorry to belabor a non-linux point--and weigh in late in the discussion at 
that, but I have been thinking about what you are trying to do.  Three 
points...

1       Veritas Backup Exec is certainly the Windows backup software least 
likely to orphan you.  It was originally Arcada backup, then Seagate Backup 
Exec, and has changed a lot but it has limited inter-operability between 
versions that makes it a safer choice than most other options.  Plus it may 
come free:  Seagate tape drives--and possibly some others--usually come 
with it bundled, plus the backup application included with Windows 98 is a 
thinly-disguised version.  By the way, most versions offer a disaster 
recovery backup and restore, but it takes a long time to run the 
restore.  You can leverage the fact there are (apparently) two servers to 
make restoring one very quick if one were to die.  Once they are up, use 
Ghost to put an image of each on the other.  You can restore from that in a 
matter of minutes, then just restore your data from tape.

2       Somewhere, I saw the comment that IDE RAID, while claiming to be 
hardware RAID, is actually software-based.  Point of fact, both IDE and 
SCSI RAID are software-based, but the software lives in BIOS instead of the 
operating system--that is, unless you are using an "advanced" OS like UNIX, 
NT, or OS/2, which need a disk driver for the RAID array.  In that case h/w 
RAID means the boot image can live on the array, but the OS needs to have 
an appropriate driver.  Not so with Windows 9x or DOS.  The array is just a 
disk like any other.  So on a Windows 95/98/ME system, IDE RAID could 
easily be just the redundancy you want.  Plus, unlike linux or NT, I don't 
think Win 9x DOES software RAID.  (Of course, this goes out the window if 
you are likely soon to migrate the system to NT/2000 or linux!)  As Matthew 
said, RAID is not a replacement for backup.  If a user or program screws up 
a file, RAID means you have two perfect copies of the screwed-up file.

3       Check out information on Filemaker Pro for the database.  A friend 
of mine who is very computer-phobic has put together a very usable address 
database using it.  At the same time, I recall a consultant trying to get 
Access to do something, and complaining it would be easier to do with 
FmPro--but we weren't then running Win32 desktops (which we were, almost 
immediately after dumping his project in favor of another system).  Back 
Office was mentioned, but doesn't it need NT or Win 2000 server?

Now for the reason it may actually pay to try to talk them into 
linux:  Microsoft is rapidly withdrawing support for any desktop other than 
XP (ick!), so it may not be the best time to put a customer on Windows 98 
or Windows 2000.



Stuart Biggerstaff

Linda Hall Library of Science Engineering & Technology
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