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The school originally had a computer room with approximately 15 386's and a 486 with modem. The modem machine was used at lunchtime to connect to the internet and was provided by the Students Council. In 1998, it was decided that the computer room needed upgrading. The 15 old machines were replaced with brand new, PII/PIII computers. There was one printer, and an ISDN line was installed. The ISDN was connected to one machine, CR1, as was the printer. In order to access the printer, or the internet, it was necessary to physically sit at CR1 and work away.

I was a student in the school,in sixth year, and being relatively familiar with networks and also wanting to learn more, proposed the possibility of networking the machines, with the idea being so everyone could access the printer. The school agreed, so a 16 port 100mb hub was purchased, and the necessary cabling. A simple peer to peer network was setup just using the basic Microsoft Networking, which allowed access to the printer for all computers, and file sharing. The network was also hired out to students at lunchtime. The Internet was also made available through a limited 30 day trial windows proxy.

There were, however, several problems with the network, most noticeably :

• Students had full access to the machine and through either simple mistakes or malice, several machines were corrupted with the end result of Windows having to be installed.
• The Internet access was restricted to the 30 day trial offer.

It was decided that what was needed was some sort of 'logging on' system. This would enable a student logon which would restrict students to the degree that they would not be able to damage the computer. Also the proxy access needed to be addressed. Windows NT was considered, however that meant the purchase of a another new computer which combined with the cost of WinNT itself, it was found to be far too expensive for the school. It was then proposed that we use Linux, installed on the old 486 to act as server. It was also chosen because simply, whilst I had a Linux install at home, I was curious about it and thought this to be the best way to learn it.

So, I took the 486 home with me for the summer and installed RedHat 5.2 on the machine. I picked RedHat simply because it was the distribution that I had on my computer. I went looking around on the net to see basicly, how to go about setting the machine up and came to the conclusion that what was need for the domain logon system was Samba, and for accesssing the internet, a proxy such as Squid, or IP Masquerading. I setup a network at home with the 486 and my computer in order to test the system.

The security was enforced through a mixture of Samba and Poledit, the Windows System Policy Editor. A policy file was created for three users, Admin, Student and teachers. This file determined the access that each profile was entitled to and also the restrictions upon them. eg. the student profile is unable to change the background or access the hard drives. Poledit, is part of the Windows 9x reskit, and is on the cd. The policy file was then put on the Linux machine ( named rice ), and when users logged onto their Win95/98 workstation, it would in turn log on to the domain that Samba created and download the file with their settings.

I tested this sytem at home and found it to be extremely reliable. The next problem was the internet access. The school had an external ISDN TA, but having no isdn at home, i set the system up using an ordinary modem to test it. It all worked grand once setup. I used Squid as a pose to IP masquerading for a few reasons.

1. Squid being primarily a caching proxy, the cache would prove to be quite useful, with the school being on a limited budget, every bit of saved time would be money.

2. The students are able to access the internet for 1 hour at lunchtime and all they would be doing would be using the WWW and maybe ftp to download files. I was also more familiar with proxies and it is also possible to restrict access to websites to a certain degree with Squid, which whilst i'm sure is possible with IP Masquerading, I didn't know how to do it.

So now everything was setup, it was to be moved back into the school, and just replace the modem with the ISDN TA. This was where problems were encountered. The logon system worked exactly as planned and still is to this day. The ISDN however proved to be unsatisfactory. When the ISDN TA was plugged in, the internet connection was established. The only problem was that when another machine tried to use the proxy, the connection was exceeding slow, in the range on several hundred bytes/s. Whilst not really asure why this occured it could possibly be 2 things.

We had to use a 25 to 9 pin adaptor to plug the isdn ta into the serial port. This could be faulty. It could also be simply that the 486 couldn't handle the speed, which again is a doubtful answer. ( if anbody has any idea as to what it could be, solutions would be appreciated. ) The end result of this was that we found a freeware proxy on the internet, which we installed on cr1. This proved to be as fast as expected. However, the only problem with this solution is that it is not possible to institute a connection to the internet from a machine on the network without some sort of commercial software. ( wingate is the only program that I have seen that allows this. )

There are several aims now for the future. We would like to have a dedicated line, thus opening endless possibilities. Email for all students and Staff, constant internet access. Webspace available for all , linux accounts available for those who want it. We woul also envisage the possibility of having several terminals around the school, which would be running X, off the main server, which could be used for internet access.

If anyone would like to donate a leased line, that would be greatly appreciated :)

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