[plug] Job opportunities? (OT) + linux school servers...

[Bernard Blackham]

On Sun, 1 Oct 2000, Leon Brooks wrote:
> Andrew Furey wrote:
> > So what do you guys think? Is there Linux (/related -
> > Perl etc) work out there in this city of ours?
> 
> Yes. Plenty. The problem is being seen by the kinds of people who (1) want to
> use Linux and (2) you will want as customers.

I once proposed the idea of moving our school servers which are currently
a mix of G3 Macs and NT boxes over to Linux servers which would handle
both Macs and PC's and allow students to share files in between. One of
the reasons the idea was turned down was due to the lack of technicians
that could support it, in the case that the only linux proficient people
at the school left (very inevitable case).  

If I could show that there is a fair base of technicians in Perth that can
support our Linux server, then my case to the school shall get a rebirth
:)

Wouldn't a Linux support company in Perth be a profitable business to
start? Or has this already been done?

<going more ot now...>

Also, could anybody perhaps suggest anything to the following plan below,
to make things even more convenient/integrated/better? Or has anybody had
any experience with setting up student servers or similar in the education
environment? If so, I would be very keen to get in touch with you.

Our school was originally planning to implement a student server to serve
the Macintosh and Windows machines at our school with personalised student
files, roaming profiles, etc. The plan was to use Novell's NDS system on
NT4 which was chosen because of it's flexibility to provide to both
Macintosh and Windows clients, to allow restrictions to logins by time and
location (IP address), amongst probably a multitude of other things, for
the few thousand dollars NDS costs.

My alternative solution was to use Linux, for web server, mail servers and
proxy servers, all eventually, but to firstly get a student file server
set up. We have Macintosh labs (OS 8.5/8.6) and PC labs (W98) that
students currently use. From the Macintoshes, a student would simply load
their volume from the Linux student server in Chooser, running
atalkd/afpd. On the W98 machines, they would actually log in,
authenticating with the samba server and pulling off their roaming
profiles, and load their logon scripts to mount their home directory.

What would also be nice is to have student's indiviudal Netscape
preferences to access mail on an IMAP box, leaving none of their own mail
on the machine itself.

PAM would be implemented to enforce the login restrictions by time and
location, possibly using the pam_group (?) module or using an LDAP server
and interfacing with the pam_ldap module. I haven't quite got this
working yet on my 'test bed'. I'd prefer to use LDAP, yet the HOWTO seems
pretty brief. Is there a more comprehensive guide to LDAP that anybody
could recommend?

And the entire solution would be basically free (besides setting
up/maintenance costs) and probably a fair bit more stable than the current
system. Can anybody please comment any suggestions or their own
experiences?

Sorry for all the ramble....

Thanks in advance,

Bernard.

-- 
 Bernard Blackham
 dagobah at mad.scientist.com