Why your school doe #039;t want boot camp

A trendI'd like to see go the way of the dodo: every time A le introduces something new that doe 't seem to a eal to theaverage home user, the net lightsup with wild eculation that it's for the education market. Most of the time it's not, and Boot Camp is noexception. The reaction to Boot Camp from MacEnterprise and other educationand busine Mac communities has not been positive. It's ranged from "wait and see" to "why me?"with most of the re o es at the "why me?" end. Boot Camp is, in the words of University sysadmin and TUAWreader Jason Young, quite po ibly"any IT staff member%26rsquo worst nightmare come true." And here are just a few of the reaso I think he'sright:

First, we live in a very imperfect world. Heterogeneous networks are me y, me y things. Sure thereare protocols for Active Directory, Open Directory, LDAP, DHCP, etc., but vendors do one of two things: fail toimplement the ec properly, or add a bunch of proprietary bells and whistles that aren't part of the ec, aretechnically add-o , but still seem to mysteriously cause hardware or software to fail when they aren't present. Throwa couple of D forwarding i ues, some CISCO equipment and maybe a Radius server into the mix, and things get uglyfast. What's the admi final line of defe e agai t complete network chaos? Hardware addre ing. Figure out whathardware is sitting at which MAC addre , and build policies based on that. It's not ideal, but it's the the way thereal world works. If you can't predict the OS type from the MAC, your job becomes 10 times harder in a flash.

Second, nobody actually wants to reboot. It's time co uming, stre ful on the hardware, and just generally not toomuch fun. It also mea getting users in the habit of interacting with the firmware, which is something sane sysadmi want to avoid at all costs. What admi , and others, want is real virtualization. Not dual booting. Not emulation andcompatibility layers. Real virtualization. When A le delivers that, there will be partying in the streets.

Third, there's no su ort and it doe 't look like there's ever going to be. Unlike the rest of us peo , largeeducation and enterprise clients end a lot of money on premium A leCare services. They have re who know them byname, and part of what makes Macs a ealing is that you call one number and get integrated hardware and OS su ort. IfA le won't su ort Windows, dual booting will mean buying a second su ort contract for the same machine. hat morethan negates the cost benefit of a single machine solution. Beige boxes are cheap and procurement already has contractswith HP and Dell. There is, of course, a potential for third parties here to step up and become A le AuthorizedResellers offering pre-configured machines with su ort, but that's a niche market. Most organizatio that buy Macswant to deal directly with A le.

And then for education tech su ort, there's the added fun of personalmachines that people use to co ect to the network....

Individual admi , of course, are thrilled. Beingable do dual boot, say, a MacBook Pro mea only needing one machine to administer everything. But su orting it forusers? That's a different story.