School Intranet Servers (was: Re: [Lias] Thanks for help re Proxy)

[Les Bell]

Robert McLeay <ches at perlboy.org> wrote:

>>
Sounds really good.

I don't know whether the time and investment in setting up an new system
would be worth it to be honest.

I'd suggest that for mail/web/mysql/dns that you grab a copy of
single-domain (freeware) PSA from www.plesk.com .

I admin shared hosting servers to keep the food/beer flowing, and Plesk
is a dream to install/run/admin/manage, compared to Ensim/CPanel
(please, please, please, don't use CPanel - urrgggh - fixing it all
arvo)
<<

Hmm. I hadn't thought of Plesk, to be honest - always seen it as more
oriented to the hosting business market, and so I'd planned on using Webmin
(http://www.webmin.com). I suspect it would provide a better interface for
email management, especially, but I think, on balance, I'll stick with
Webmin for the time being, mainly on account of familiarity. Also, since
Webmin is open source Perl code, I stand a better chance of hacking in the
appropriate changes or even a module for this specific "application".

To be honest, it's a pretty simple setup. The major trick is going to be
setting up a schema to allow for the kids to be members of the appropriate
groups - e.g. their class, which will change each year, project groups,
etc. - together with some scripts to automate their management.

For my simple "sales demo" at our computer committee meeting, I created a
few demo accounts in advance. I'd already modified /etc/skel so that each
kids' home directory had the appropriate folders created, including one
called "website" which is actually the Apache "public_html" directory. Then
I demo'ed manually creating a new user within Webmin, which automatically
takes care of setting up the appropriate smbpasswd entry as well, and
showed a default kid's home page, then edited that from within Windows. In
real life, the accounts will need to be created using a batch import
technique (Webmin has one) and ideally, automatically managed from that
point onwards.

>>
Sounds and looks like a really idea.
<<

Please, please tell me there's a "good" in there somewhere! <g>

I'll post another email to this list detailing features I'm aiming for. The
intention is not to create a completely off-the-shelf turnkey package or
(heaven help us!) another distribution, but instead to write up some
articles on how to do these things. That's how I make my living, and who
knows?, if a magazine somewhere picks up an article or two out of it, my
kids will get to eat that month. <g> However, along the way, I'm happy to
put what I've done up on the web so people can benefit immediately, and
equally I'd be really pleased to accept suggestions, feature requests, and
pointers to better ways of doing things.

Best,

--- Les Bell, CISSP
[http://www.lesbell.com.au]