- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Debian_Edu_interview__Mike_Gabriel.html">Debian Edu interview: Mike Gabriel</a></div>
- <div class="date"> 2nd June 2012</div>
- <div class="body"><p>Back in 2010, Mike Gabriel showed up on the
-<a href="http://www.skolelinux.org/">Debian Edu and Skolelinux</a>
-mailing list. He quickly proved to be a valuable developer, and
-thanks to his tireless effort we now have Kerberos integrated into the
-<a href="http://www.debian.org/News/2012/20120311.html">Debian Edu
-Squeeze</a> version.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Who are you, and how do you spend your days?</strong></p>
-
-<p>My name is Mike Gabriel, I am 38 years old and live near Kiel,
-Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. I live together with a wonderful partner
-(Angela Fuß) and two own children and two bonus children (contributed
-by Angela).</p>
-
-<p>During the day I am part-time employed as a system administrator
-and part-time working as an IT consultant. The consultancy work
-touches free software topics wherever and whenever possible. During
-the nights I am a free software developer. In the gaps I also train in
-becoming an osteopath.</p>
-
-<p>Starting in 2010 we (Andreas Buchholz, Angela Fuß, Mike Gabriel)
-have set up a free software project in the area of Kiel that aims at
-introducing free software into schools. The project's name is
-"IT-Zukunft Schule" (IT future for schools). The project links IT
-skills with communication skills.</p>
-
-<p><strong>How did you get in contact with the Skolelinux/Debian Edu
-project?</strong></p>
-
-<p>While preparing our own customised Linux distribution for
-"IT-Zukunft Schule" we were repeatedly asked if we really wanted to
-reinvent the wheel. What schools really need is already available,
-people said. From this impulse we started evaluating other Linux
-distributions that target being used for school networks.</p>
-
-<p>At the end we short-listed two approaches and compared them: a
-commercial Linux distribution developed by a company in Bremen,
-Germany, and Skolelinux / Debian Edu. Between 12/2010 and 03/2011 we
-went to several events and met people being responsible for marketing
-and development of either of the distributions. Skolelinux / Debian
-Edu was by far much more convincing compared to the other product that
-got short-listed beforehand--across the full spectrum. What was most
-attractive for me personally: the perspective of collaboration within
-the developmental branch of the Debian Edu project itself.</p>
-
-<p>In parallel with this, we talked to many local and not-so-local
-people. People teaching at schools, headmasters, politicians, data
-protection experts, other IT professionals.</p>
-
-<p>We came to two conclusions:</p>
-
-<p>First, a technical conclusion: What schools need is available in
-bits and pieces here and there, and none of the solutions really fit
-by 100%. Any school we have seen has a very individual IT setup
-whereas most of each school's requirements could mapped by a standard
-IT solution. The requirement to this IT solution is flexibility and
-customisability, so that individual adaptations here and there are
-possible. In terms of re-distributing and rolling out such a
-standardised IT system for schools (a system that is still to some
-degree customisable) there is still a lot of work to do here
-locally. Debian Edu / Skolelinux has been our choice as the starting
-point.</p>
-
-<p>Second, a holistic conclusion: What schools need does not exist at
-all (or we missed it so far). There are several technical solutions
-for handling IT at schools that tend to make a good impression. What
-has been missing completely here in Germany, though, is the enrolment
-of people into using IT and teaching with IT. "IT-Zukunft Schule"
-tries to provide an approach for this.</p>
-
-<p>Only some schools have some sort of a media concept which explains,
-defines and gives guidance on how to use IT in class. Most schools in
-Northern Germany do not have an IT service provider, the school's IT
-equipment is managed by one or (if the school is lucky) two (admin)
-teachers, most of the workload these admin teachers get done in there
-spare time.</p>
-
-<p>We were surprised that only a very few admin teachers were
-networked with colleagues from other schools. Basically, every school
-here around has its individual approach of providing IT equipment to
-teachers and students and the exchange of ideas has been quasi
-non-existent until 2010/2011.</p>
-
-<p>Quite some (non-admin) teachers try to avoid using IT technology in
-class as a learning medium completely. Several reasons for this
-avoidance do exist.</p>
-
-<p>We discovered that no-one has ever taken a closer look at this
-social part of IT management in schools, so far. On our quest journey
-for a technical IT solution for schools, we discussed this issue with
-several teachers, headmasters, politicians, other IT professionals and
-they all confirmed: a holistic approach of considering IT management
-at schools, an approach that includes the people in place, will be new
-and probably a gain for all.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the advantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>There is a list of advantages: international context, openness to
-any kind of contributions, do-ocracy policy, the closeness to Debian,
-the different installation scenarios possible (from stand-alone
-workstation to complex multi-server sites), the transparency within
-project communication, honest communication within the group of
-developers, etc.</p>
-
-<p><strong>What do you see as the disadvantages of Skolelinux/Debian
-Edu?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Every coin has two sides:</p>
-
-<p>Technically: <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/311188">BTS issue
-#311188</a>, tricky upgradability of a Debian Edu main server, network
-client installations on top of a plain vanilla Debian installation
-should become possible sometime in the near future, one could think
-about splitting the very complex package debian-edu-config into
-several portions (to make it easier for new developers to
-contribute).</p>
-
-<p>Another issue I see is that we (as Debian Edu developers) should
-find out more about the network of people who do the marketing for
-Debian Edu / Skolelinux. There is a very active group in Germany
-promoting Skolelinux on the bigger Linux Days within Germany. Are
-there other groups like that in other countries? How can we bring
-these marketing people together (marketing group A with group B and
-all of them with the group of Debian Edu developers)? During the last
-meeting of the German Skolelinux group, I got the impression of people
-there being rather disconnected from the development department of
-Debian Edu / Skolelinux.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which free software do you use daily?</strong></p>
-
-<p>For my daily business, I do not use commercial software at all.</p>
-
-<p>For normal stuff I use Iceweasel/Firefox, Libreoffice.org. For
-serious text writing I prefer LaTeX. I use gimp, inkscape, scribus for
-more artistic tasks. I run virtual machines in KVM and Virtualbox.</p>
-
-<p>I am one of the upstream developers of X2Go. In 2010 I started the
-development of a Python based X2Go Client, called PyHoca-GUI.
-PyHoca-GUI has brought forth a Python X2Go Client API that currently
-is being integrated in Ubuntu's software center.</p>
-
-<p>For communications I have my own Kolab server running using Horde
-as web-based groupware client. For IRC I love to use irssi, for Jabber
-I have several clients that I use, mostly pidgin, though. I am also
-the Debian maintainer of Coccinella, a Jabber-based interactive
-whiteboard.</p>
-
-<p>My favourite terminal emulator is KDE's Yakuake.</p>
-
-<p><strong>Which strategy do you believe is the right one to use to
-get schools to use free software?</strong></p>
-
-<p>Communicate, communicate, communicate. Enrol people, enrol people,
-enrol people.</p>
-</div>
- <div class="tags">
-
-
- Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian edu">debian edu</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/intervju">intervju</a>.
-
-
- </div>
- </div>
- <div class="padding"></div>
-
- <div class="entry">
- <div class="title"><a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/SOAP_based_webservice_from_Dell_to_check_server_support_status.html">SOAP based webservice from Dell to check server support status</a></div>
- <div class="date"> 1st June 2012</div>
- <div class="body"><p>A few years ago I wrote
-<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Checking_server_hardware_support_status_for_Dell__HP_and_IBM_servers.html">how
-to extract support status</a> for your Dell and HP servers. Recently
-I have learned from colleges here at the
-<a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a> that Dell have
-made this even easier, by providing a SOAP based web service. Given
-the service tag, one can now query the Dell servers and get machine
-readable information about the support status. This perl code
-demonstrate how to do it:</p>
-
-<p><pre>
-use strict;
-use warnings;
-use SOAP::Lite;
-use Data::Dumper;
-my $GUID = '11111111-1111-1111-1111-111111111111';
-my $App = 'test';
-my $servicetag = $ARGV[0] or die "Please supply a servicetag. $!\n";
-my ($deal, $latest, @dates);
-my $s = SOAP::Lite
- -> uri('http://support.dell.com/WebServices/')
- -> on_action( sub { join '', @_ } )
- -> proxy('http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx')
- ;
-my $a = $s->GetAssetInformation(
- SOAP::Data->name('guid')->value($GUID)->type(''),
- SOAP::Data->name('applicationName')->value($App)->type(''),
- SOAP::Data->name('serviceTags')->value($servicetag)->type(''),
-);
-print Dumper($a -> result) ;
-</pre></p>
-
-<p>The output can look like this:</p>
-
-<p><pre>
-$VAR1 = {
- 'Asset' => {
- 'Entitlements' => {
- 'EntitlementData' => [
- {
- 'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
- 'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
- 'Provider' => '',
- 'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
- 'DaysLeft' => '0'
- },
- {
- 'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
- 'EndDate' => '2009-07-29T00:00:00',
- 'Provider' => '',
- 'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
- 'DaysLeft' => '0'
- },
- {
- 'EntitlementType' => 'Expired',
- 'EndDate' => '2007-07-29T00:00:00',
- 'Provider' => '',
- 'StartDate' => '2006-07-29T00:00:00',
- 'DaysLeft' => '0'
- }
- ]
- },
- 'AssetHeaderData' => {
- 'SystemModel' => 'GX620',
- 'ServiceTag' => '8DSGD2J',
- 'SystemShipDate' => '2006-07-29T19:00:00-05:00',
- 'Buid' => '2323',
- 'Region' => 'Europe',
- 'SystemID' => 'PLX_GX620',
- 'SystemType' => 'OptiPlex'
- }
- }
- };
-</pre></p>
-
-<p>I have not been able to find any documentation from Dell about this
-service outside the
-<a href="http://xserv.dell.com/services/assetservice.asmx?op=GetAssetInformation">inline
-documentation</a>, and according to
-<a href="http://iboyd.net/index.php/2012/02/14/updated-dell-warranty-information-script/">one
-comment</a> it can have stability issues, but it is a lot better than
-scraping HTML pages. :)</p>
-
-<p>Wonder if HP and other server vendors have a similar service. If
-you know of one, drop me an email. :)</p>
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