netphilter's Journal: Deployment Woes

You know, there's nothing more frustrating than having NOTHING go right. I'm in the process of deploying a (very expensive) e-government framework that eventually will host over 250 local government web sites complete with registration, calendaring, discussion, etc. I was assured that site migration and installation would be a snap, but I'm learning that it is anything but. What was supposed to take an hour or two of my time is now into it's second full day. The most frustrating thing about all of this is that I had no choice in the software to be used for this project...it was given to us by the grant from the State. So the gov paid something like $25,000 for a product that does nothing more than PHP-Nuke. We had to buy SQL 2000, Windows 2000 and all the licensing fees that go along with that. I now have to support SQl 2000, which I have never touched and know next to nothing about. We also have to figure out some way to sustain this project and it's ongoing costs. I would have much preferred to setup a Linux box, install Apach and PHP-Nuke and be done with the whole thing. Ahhh...if only the whole world knew the benefits of OSS.