On Mon, 08 Jan 2001 15:52:53 linda hanigan wrote:
>Hi all,
>Our parish school has 24 computers in their computer room and maybe 20
>computers in the teachers
>classrooms most of which are networked together. Right
>now they don't have any servers, and I my understanding
>is they are not connected to the internet. From what my
>5th grader tells me they have bought corel's wordperfect
>family pac and have a bunch of games.
If they don't have enough legal licenses to do what they want to do, you
might introduce them to StarOffice. It's free and looks/acts a lot like any
other office suite. If you use any Linux desktops/Xterminals later, you can
run StarOffice on them too. A Mac version is due this Spring if there are
any of those machines hanging around.
>They of course
>have almost no money. I got into a discussion
>with the computer teacher about the linux intranet I had
>set up at work for our small business and he was very
>interested in the possiblities of using Linux for servers
>and maybe some other functions. He is really tired of
>Windows crashing. What would be reasonable
>requirements for the following machines:
>A machine that would act as a firewall that they could
>use to access the internet?
>A mailserver,
Sendmail ships with a lot of distros, but postfix is supposed to be more
secure. It ships in the latest Red Hat distro. I'm a sendmail guy, but if I
were setting this up I'd use postfix.
You can use OpenLDAP for a shared directory. The Rolodap project at
Sourceforge is supposed to be pretty easy to use for an end-user managed
shared address book. I've used ldap-abook with some success in small
workgroups with limited needs. I use GQ at home because I basically do it
all myself.
LDAP is supported by the more popular mail clients. Outlook 98/2000, Outlook
Express, Netscape, and Eudora all support it well enough. StarOffice's
support is somewhat weak though. It's not well-integrated into the mail
client. Pine and Balsa also have good support for LDAP if yo plan top have
any Linux desktops around.
>A Printserver,
>A fileserver - using samba to connect to windows
>machines?
128MB RAM minimum, more is better if concurrent sessions are expected. Any
recent PIII machine should have sufficient processing speed. Go with as much
memory as you can afford. 20GB disks are common and not expensive these
days. Make sure you can add another disk later. You really need SCSI, but I
doubt you can fit it into the budget ;-)
You'll need some kind of backup. Tape is the best, but a second hard disk
would be simpler and cheaper.
>What would they need if they wanted to create their own
>intranet where the older kids could create web pages
>and other classes could view them?
Netscape or any recent word processor can produce basic pages. The default
Red Hat permission for user directories does not permit viewing of user web
pages by Apache (which normally runs as "nobody"). You'll have to change the
permissions to at least 711 to enable this. You will also need to add a
public_html directory to /etc/skel with 755 permissions. This is so that
when you create new users, they will already have this dir. Apache is
configured to use that directory by default for user web pages. You will
probably need to get familiar with Apache configuration, but the default is
generally safe enough to keep end-users out of mischief.
>Is there a free program that would allow them to logon
>to a linux machine from the window machines so the
>older kids that were interested could learn some basic
>programing?
I use PuTTY to run SSH sessions from my Winboxes to my servers. It's free
and works pretty well. The terminal emulation is adequate -- better than
Windows telnet. Pico and mcedit are easy editors for those coming from a
DOS/Win background. I favor mcedit because it doesn't wrap lines by default.
There's a commandline option that disables wrapping in pico. Pico is a
little quicker too.
>and what hardware would you need to have
>a whole class logged on working with the compiler so it
>would not be too slow?
That depends on the complexity of the programs. For grade school projects, a
recent PIII 450 or better should be sufficient.
>I know what it takes for 4 or 5 computers but I have no
>idea what you need for something this big.
You could do all this on one box, but two might be better, with the slower
machine acting as a firewall and masquerading box. It's relatively easy to
keep kids from sending/receiving Internet mail if their accounts are on a
different box than the staff member accounts. If that is a concern, a little
editing of sendmail's relay rules is not too hard. I don't know how to
implement that using Postfix, but it should be possible.
> I also don't
>have any experience with firewalls and the internet,
IPchains is what you need. You will probably need to learn to use it pretty
well to get things setup just the way you want. There's a HOWTO at the LDP
site <http://www.linuxdoc.org/>. But to start, you can get a GUI front-end
called Firestarter <http://firestarter.sourceforge.net>.
>although I have been trying to make time to play
>with this at home. Sorry this is such a long post
If you have not already done so, you should check out the SEUL project's
education section <http://www.seul.org/edu/>. They have lots of info and
software for using Linux in educational environments.
Tony
--
Anthony E. Greene <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://www.pobox.com/~agreene/>
PGP Key: 0x6C94239D/7B3D BD7D 7D91 1B44 BA26 C484 A42A 60DD 6C94 239D
Chat: AOL/Yahoo: TonyG05 ICQ: 91183266
Linux. The choice of a GNU Generation. <http://www.linux.org/>
_______________________________________________
Redhat-list mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
