Introduction

["Matthew Wright" <mattyw@hotmail.com>]

Gday all,

I'd just like to introduce myself as i'm a recent addition to the list.  
I am the Network/Systems Administrator at a school in Melbourne 
Australia, namely Swinburne Senior Secondary College.   The school is 
fairly progressive in all ways I can think of except in its attitude 
towards Information Technology.

Currently the school has around 50 windows95 boxes, 15 win3.1 (remote 
bootprom boxes -486sx25/4mb on a Novell 3.12 network) and 20 macs 
including 15 imacs.  I am personally responsible for the x86 computers 
only, however I tend to spend more time helping the zealouts in the mac 
room than working on my own networks. All the schools are networked with 
BNC cable (Legacy but cheap) 10mb/s (except for boot prom machines 
2mb/s).  <--That should give anyone interested a bit of a background 
brief. All machines have internet access (TCP/IP network) via a Linux 
box I set up around 2.5 years ago (Currently 
P200/196mb/10gbuwscsi/3Nics) primarily runs squid with a 2gb proxy 
cache, the universitys proxy server is its parent. 

On Tuesday this week I invited the Computer Coordinator (whom i'm very 
good friends with) around to my house to show him Linux/X.  I can 
happily say he is now a convert.  He is a fairly knowledgable guy, a 
teacher of programming etc.  So I was able to give him a crash course in 
around 2hours.  I demonstrated the multitasking abililites at the 
console. I demonstrated how Xclients are the programs and the servers 
are what run on the workstations (this is fairly heavy but he soon 
comprehended it all) At home i only have 1 linux box (Celeron300a 
running at 450/128mb) so i downloaded a freeware X server for win32 and 
installed it on a couple of workstations.  Then I demonstrated the 
networking, of X, this is what sold him.  Its easily explained to the 
uninitiated as "Just like the old wyse 50 dumb terminals".

Anyhow this is the plan.
Dual P450 with 4.3gbUW scsi disk serving 30 workstations.  workstations 
have very thin linux installation with Xfree86

Then for productivity we'll be using wp8 + staroffice (they choose) gimp 
and netscape (hopefully when mozilla the  thin version is available we 
can switch to that) and all plethrer of other utilities programming 
stuff I'll also be using gnome on the destkop,  I believe that we'll be 
the first australian high school to have linux as the standard desktop

Anyhow that is the current status of what i'm trying to do here at 
swinburne.

Any questions, please don't hesitate to write.

Regards

Matt

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