I’ve been using Ubuntu 11.04 in the corporate environment for over a year now and this post will attempt to summarise the frankly disappointing state of affairs that is “linux in the corporate environment”.
Thumnbnails
Such a little thing – getting a thumbnail for your images, videos or office documents. In Windows, once a directory has been thumbnailed, it creates a hidden file “thumbs.db” in that directory, so that when other people visit the directory, there’s no need to recreate every thumbnail from scratch.
In Ubuntu, however, there is. Every user stores their own version of thumbnails . At work, my .thumbnails directory is a little shy of 40Mb. If you multiply that by 1000 employees, you’ve just wasted 39.96Gb of data creating the same set of thumbnails 1000 times. Bandwidth, Disk I/O, wasted. Worse, if you make your staff’s home directories a network share, you’re now wasting 40Gb of storage across your home share.
It’s a poor model and needs fixed.
Encrypted Home Directories with Likewise
Wanted an encrypted home directory? Easy – tick the box when you install and you’ve got one. But wait. Logging with AD credentials after installing Likewise? Nope. Likewise creates a non-encrypted domain directory in your /home and every user that logs in thereafter gets an unencrypted home.
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