Re: [LUG] Daughter's computer

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Subject: Re: [LUG] Daughter's computer

From: Giles Coochey <giles@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2019 14:30:14 +0000

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On 07/11/2019 13:55, Grant Phillips-Sewell wrote:

On Thu, 7 Nov 2019, 10:40 Giles Coochey, <giles@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 06/11/2019 13:13, Grant Phillips-Sewell wrote:
>
> Forgive me if this comes across as rude, but obliterating the whole
> system when it seems only 1 thing is broken... seems like a very
> Windows way of operating.
>
Well actually, this is what we tend to do in corporate land - we ensure
that users just don't store any data locally, and if they experience any
kind of problem then we just F12 at boot, PXE boot, and deploy a new
image to the box. The way it is that there is just no point in spending
more than 30 minutes on a system looking for what the problem is, just
re-image as it takes less time. Manually installing a new Ubuntu by hand
still takes less time, and you can be sure that if the problem was a
security issue - malware, virus or whatever, then you'll obliterate that
as well.

Yep, however there are at least a couple of caveats here.

+ This is not a corporate setup and the user data is not stored separately.

+ If the issue is with a software update that gets applied, the issue is likely to appear again very soon.

9 times out of 10 the problem is PEBKAC / Layer-8 issue. I was more intimating about the amount of time spending on discovering how they've knackered their system, followed by even longer period of time trying to fix it, with corporate users it's often a case of they can't or won't tell you how they did it, but they might learn the second / third time to save further embarrassment. When managing and maintaining systems at scale, we just rebuild (and we have an efficient process to do that automatically). When the cost of hiring an IT engineer varies between anything from £20-£75 an hour, it's far more cost effective to re-image, rather than spend days on a problem.

Granted, you can't translate all corporate methods to home environments all the time. Interested to find out what the computer shop people think though.

-- 
Giles Coochey