[K12OSN] Not recreating the wheel

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2004-05-13 at 14:13, Lewis Holcroft wrote:

> Currently there are five locations. The main location has one router to 
> the internet and one router to each of the four remote offices. Our 
> product is located on the main server and is accessed via a telnet 
> client. Hence the small bandwidth to the remote sites. The Main server 
> is also a DHCP server and the routers to the remote locations support 
> DHCP relay. So was are able to control the network routing and the like 
> from the main server. This setup also allows us to route web browsing 
> out through an internet connection at each location and limit traffic 
> over the very slow ISDN lines.

I would dual-NIC the servers so only the 'outside' addresses need
to deal with routing. Then I'd put in some kind of VPN to link the
sites over the faster internet connections, possibly keeping the
ISDN as a backup.  This can be done in software on the servers
or with external VPN routers.

You won't like NFS mounting the home directories.  I'd have
local home directories and teach people how to use ftp
to pull files from remote sites if they need them (this is
painless in nautilus).  It's much better to have a problem
with slow or unreliable file copies that you can try later
than to have done a lot of work in an application and then
have trouble saving directly over NFS.

Everything else should just work.  People may like evolution
better than web mail but either should work against an imap server.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com