Re: [seul-edu] Linux Servers

[Ray Olszewski <ray@comarre.com>]

At 09:03 AM 12/27/00 -0800, Emilio Gerardo Milian wrote:
...
>Thanks for your response, just to make you aware of what I'm thinking
>and your comments or suggestions to improve on it:
>The South San Francisco Adult School is a small school. We have ten PC
>computers
>(Pentium III 550 MHZ with 64 M RAM) with RH 6.2 and 2 power macs with
>Yellow Dog Linux running. 
>All connected to the internet, so we can surf the web.

As you seem to suspect from your comment below, converting one of the PCs to
a server should handle your needs quite adequately. Assuming hard-disk
capacity is adequate, you may want to add

        another 64 (or even 128 or 192) megs of RAM
        a second NIC (depending on the details of your firewall curriculum)

>There will be 2 classes, the first 6 weeks will be the basic Linux,
>which is basically to install it and to get familiar with the OS and
>navigating the file system.
>Typical student is familiar with windows, but knows nothing about Linux.
>The objective is to give students a taste of Linux by running it on
>their own home pc, and thus give them the tools they need to start using
>it, and getting other people interested too.
>
>The last 6 weeks (towards the end of March) will be the "advanced" part
>of the course, I haven't finalized the topics but I'm thinking of
>covering: a) Setting up Apache web server
>b) Setting up DHCP
>c) Installing Sendmail
>d) setting up a firewall
>e) and finally maybe setting up DNS server.

This is a pretty good set to start with. A couple of thoughts:

A. DHCP -- you should teach the setup of both clients dhcpc or dhclient) and
the server (dhcpd). Otherwise they'll only know how to serve addresses to
WIndows workstations.

B. Sendmail is still the most familiar name in MTAs, but it is no longer as
ubiquitous as it once was. You should think about the relative merits of
sendmail, exim, and qmail (and maybe others).

C. If you mean a firewalling router, these are best set up independent of
actual servers. There are several nice "small linux" implementations that
turn 486s into firewalling routers -- Linux Router Project
(www.linuxrouter.org) and it successor LEAF (leaf.sourceforge.net), Coyote,
and FreeSCO (don't have the URLs handy for the last two).

D. No maybe about it. Two branches here -- a caching DNS server for
workstations on your LAN, and an authoritative DNS server for a domain. Both
are very valuable skills to teach budding sysadmins.

The omitted one you should consider is Samba, specifically if you are
training these people to get work in situations where they will support
Linux servers but Windows workstations.


--
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski                                        -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA           	 	         ray@comarre.com        
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