Re: [seul-edu] School in Taiwan

[Doug Loss <dloss@suscom.net>]

Stanwood Barret Dolph wrote:
> 
> Well, our school has been thriving...we will be opening a kindergarden and
> another school in Taipei...But our Linux program has gone nowhere.  Despite
> much searching I could not find anyone interested in coming to Taiwan to
> help us teach Linux.
> 
You might ask Hilaire Fernandes how he was attracted to Taiwan to teach,
since he's from France.  Perhaps the methods that "hooked" him might
work on others.  Or maybe he knows someone who would consider joing your
team.

> Nontheless, the opening of two more schools presents us with both problems
> and possibilities. We will need to have some improvement in our accounting
> software. Right now we use Access which works but is not really a solution.
> My manager and I patched together an accounting plan two years ago and we
> still use a modification of this.
> 
> 2) Can we use this to operate both finances and our website? Local advise
> says no...Is there anyway around the security problems.
> 
Roger's right.  The best security is to not be connected to the net. 
The next best is to be running the absolute minimum of network services
on the system and monitor them carefully.  Running both finances and an
open website on the same box goes against both principles.

For the webserver, a good Linux install would be ideal.  Apache
webserver is included in almost all distros these days, and there are a
number of web-based educational environments available (at least two of
them are our own projects AUC and LearnLoop).  I'm told that Mandrake is
a very nice and easy-to-install distro, and we know that they're working
on educational questions with the French ministry of education.  Also,
OpenClassroom has a system you might consider looking into.  Jeff Elkner
at Yorktown HS in Arlington, VA can tell you more about that.

> 3) Database....Which Software should we use  and does anybody know of any
> Universities which might be interested in working together to see how an
> accounting program gets designed.
> 
That's an interesting problem.  Let me talk to some people in the CIS
department here and see what they might be interested in doing.

-- 
Doug Loss                 Even if you're on the right track,
Data Network Coordinator  you'll get run over if you just
Bloomsburg University     sit there.
dloss@bloomu.edu                Will Rogers