Dallas Indian Methodist Church Outreach Project

Background:

Goals - Church:

1. To teach:
   • Computer literacy.
   • Word processing.
   • Spreadsheets.
   • Presentations.
   • Browsers and Internet access.
   • Electronic mail.
   • Establish an open platform for future hardware/software computer training projects.
2. Run Windows based educational programs.
3. Enhance office operations by use of standard office suite type programs.

Goals – User groups:

1. An opportunity to participate in a community service project.
2. An opportunity to learn systems administration.
3. An opportunity to gain actual experience in systems administration.

Objectives:

1. Establish an upstairs classroom with enough desktop computers to teach a class of up to 20 students. Network access should be by standard wired ethernet.
2. Establish a downstairs class area with enough laptops to teach 10 students. Network access should be wireless.
3. Establish sufficient servers & printers to support classrooms.
4. Establish sufficient servers & printers to support office.
5. Establish disk & print services for systems running Windows.
6. Power, network wiring & infrastructure as required.
7. Establish Internet access.

Details - Hardware:

1. Upstairs classroom:
   • I believe we have received sufficient desktop computers & monitors to populate a classroom for 20. (Additional donations are always welcome!)
   • We are short of hard drives for desktop computers. Drives of 40GB or larger would be appreciated!
   • We also need mice & keyboards.
   • We do not have enough hubs and/or routers to support a classroom of 20 systems.
2. Downstairs class area:
   • The office area will double as the downstairs class area.
   • We have received two laptops. Neither are functional. (Laptop repair experts needed...)
   • Additional laptop donations are welcome. Would preferably include built in wireless or wireless networking card(s).
   • We have received 2 wireless routers. Brands & capabilities TBD.
3. Office:
   • The office is currently using 2 Windows based systems. Current plan is to put enough network services in place to support these systems asis. Conversion to Linux TBD.
4. Servers & printers to support classrooms & office:
   • Two systems have been designated as servers. One server will be located downstairs in the church office, the second upstairs in the classroom. (One is a dual xeon, the other dual P3)
   • We should consider a UPS for each server. (Any spare UPS out there?)
   • At least 4 printers have been donated. Brand & models TBD. (2 b/w laser & 2 color ink jet)
5. Network wiring & infrastructure:
   • Classroom selection is still in flux; we need more information in order to determine how much cat5 wire and hubs/routers will be required.
   • This is an older building, circa 1950. The upstairs to downstairs network link(s) may require creative engineering. Perhaps the "old" BNC interconnect? If I recall correctly, this is good for about 1000 feet.
6. Power:
   • This is an older building. Additional power will need to be installed. We need to help by determining power requirements for the upstairs classroom, the downstairs class area, the servers, and any other infrastructure.
7. Internet:
   • Internet access will be deferred until later. A local copy of the (K)Ubuntu repository has been established for interim use.

Details - Software:

1. Install Kubuntu v8.x on servers and workstations.
2. DHCP - Both servers should run the dhcp server daemon v3 in fail over mode.
3. DNS - Both servers should run bind v9. One will be configured as master, the other as a slave. Initially, they will act as authoritative name servers for the church's internal network. Later, they will assume an additional duty as caching name servers for Internet access.
4. NTP - Both servers should run the ntp server daemon. Initially the servers should be configured as peers, using their internal clocks as a local reference. When Internet access is established, each server should access 3 Internet based time references, with the internal clock disciplined to match Internet time. The peer link should remain in the event the Internet connection is disrupted. Workstations should consult both servers and discipline their internal clocks.
5. NIS - Both servers should run the NIS server daemon. One will be configured as master, the other as a slave. NIS will serve out the user, password & group databases and any maps required by NFS.
6. AUTOFS - TBD - Autofs v4 is in the main repository. (Although technically still in beta, perhaps we should look at autofs v5. It finally supports Sun style direct maps!)
7. NFS - Both servers should be NFS servers. One server should hold /home directories for the accounts used by the office. The other server should hold /home directories for the classroom accounts. One or both servers may serve out the repository. (TBD - Would like to see some redundancy or fail over here...)
8. Internet - TBD - If/when an Internet connection is established, some kind of content filtering will probably be required. Squid Internet proxy?
9. Email - TBD – Depends mostly on what Internet solution the church chooses.
10. Email/Milters - TBD - Establish spam, virus, content filtering and/or logging email milters as required.
11. Email - One server should be designated the mail server and run both the pop3 and imap4 daemons. (TBD - Is redundancy or fail over possible here???)
12. Cups - TBD - Cups should be used to automatically serve out the printers to the workstations. Workstations should be configured to auto magically use any printer available on the network.
13. Samba - TBD - Serve out the /home directories & printers.
14. Backup - TBD - Preliminary discussions suggest using RSYNC to mirror each server to the other.
15. WindowsSoftware - TBD - There is a desire to install several Windows based educational packages. We need to be sure we make a good faith effort to enforce any terms or conditions outlined in the licensing agreements.
16. LinuxSoftware - TBD - software the users will either need, or would like to use in place of Windows.
17. PXE boot - TBD - Required to support a automated OS installation and configuration process.
18. Automated OS install & configuration - TBD - We should develop a process to install the OS and make all the required changes to configuration files. This should be a PXE/network boot based process.