Well, I am working on learning Nethserver . It is a bit of a learning curve after being more familiar with Puppy Linux and Turnkey Linux, but it seems to be the best solution for my current project.
So what is my current project? To build a cheap, stable, reliable computer network for a school in Shan State, Myanmar. This may prove to be a model for other similar schools… it’s early days, though.
Challenges include: limited and unreliable power supply; limited budget; limited technical support /skills of the staff; limited and old hardware ( usually second-hand/refurbished ) ; limited or no internet access on site ; the need for flexible design and scalability.
Opportunities include: making a real difference to students teachers and communities lives ; working with amazingly warm and lovely people ; re-using skills developed over the years as Australian schools introduced technology in classrooms; keeping my brain lively in retirement
Experiences so far:
Having set up a rudimentary Windows7 workgroup network with an attached NAS, for a classroom, I left my Shan colleagues and returned to Australia.
Did my first Nethserver install, started to get familiar. Felt like I was on the right path.
Discovered I couldn’t get shared printing to work, AT ALL.
Had an inspiration, and restarted from scratch, this time with a USB printer attached before beginning install, and installing the CUPS module as the first bit of software after updates. Made sure I could print from within CUPS. THEN I installed the File-sharing module, and THEN the Active Directory, and Voila! … shared printers now visible to Windows clients
Next steps in this journey - get it all working the way I want [ including squid for when they DO get internet ] , then destroy, and redo all install and subsequent setup, to verify and document / write manual , before taking back to the field.
Hi @gurujim,
welcome at the community. Nice to hear that you are happy with the product.
If you have questions don’t hesitate to ask them. I want to quote @alefattorini
Only a question which is not asked is a stupid question
This is the motto here and for me the very best motto a forum can have.
I’m working on a network problem, one client lose the connection to the domain sporadically and after an hour the connection is back again.
Happy to see you here. We have an @education_team and a lot of discussions about schools. I’d like to connect you with @robb@syntaxerrormmm@apradoc they can provide you a lot of advice
Welcome @gurujim. I am very glad to see another sysadmin in an educational situation. I hope we can help you with your tasks, and maybe you can help us developing NethServer further as THE opensource education ict solution.
Please open a new topic with your specific questions. We probably can help. Aditionally we will have questions for you on options and features we should add to NethServer to make it an even better educational solution.
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alefattorini
(Alessio Fattorini)
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By trade I’m a computer engineer with a love of every thing open source. Sadly my working life is all Windows based. But my home is a MS free zone, even my gaming rig is now linux thanks to valve.
I used to be a huge ClearOS advocate (another fab opens source distro) for may years but what turned me over to Neth was the fact that it’s basicly CentOS with a webconfig. Thus all CentOS how to’s generally work with out braking anything. ClearOS I found is more heavily edited CentOS.
What am I working on, well I’m in the middle of having some work done to my house and while doing so have run Cat6a every where so that I can leave the WiFi for mobile devices and give full reliable bandwidth to every thing else.
My electrician just dose not under stand that I don’t want to use WiFi for every thing lol.
I’m now at the stage where I can get all my servers back into the rack and start configuration.
One Little atom based system Nethserver 7 for AD, firewall, email, http & Nut server.
Then an AMD system also Nethserver 7 with 8 hotswap bays for storage, media server, VM’s & Nut client.
And lastly another low power Intel i3 system with hot swap bays running Ubuntu for MythTV backend, Nut client & more VM’s. Mainly game server VM’s.
I just expanded my server with a new 8TB zfs pool of 2 morrored 8TB HDD’s. Currently my main NethServer instance (that is running Samba4 AD account provider) is being moved from the old 2TB ZFS pool to the new pool, so I don’t run into full disk issues.
I realy love the flexibility of ProxMox…
Further, since @mrmarkuz created this superb howto install Diaspora* on NethServer, I am running my own pod at https://pod.interlin.nl. Really remarkable how this distributed social media network is running. I hope I can add some more features to the pod soon.
I am a consultant that is donating a bunch of computers to my sons school which is a new startup. Right now they don’t have the money to afford things like Windows Server licenses and such so I am playing with NethServer to use instead. So far I have managed to get the domain up and running with shares for all the faculty.
I was a Windows admin for YEARS but have also done a good amount of Linux work too. That being said I think the interface for NethServer is really easy to use and it seems pretty stable. Thanks for such a great product!
My only complaint right now is that it doesn’t seem like there is a way to have a BDC so that might be an issue if the PDC dies (since it’s only a desktop machine with one hard drive - not a whole lot of backup and redundancy ability right now). Still, this is more of a “would be nice to have” than a “need”.
@ElementZero, Great effort on the school support! I am still active at the primary school where my kids used to go to. They didn’t have any ict at all when I started and I went on a begging spree to all kinds of companies if they had some ict equipment they didn’t use anymore. Now there is a realy nice server running Linux (currently Linuxschools Karoshi Server) and a movable cupboard with 24 laptops and every classroom has at least 3 network connections to the main 48port managed switch.
Looks like you are perfect to join our @education_team. So if you are interested, please say so and I gladly add you to the team.
Is hotsync to enable multiple DC’s in 1 network? I was under impression that hotsync is meant to duplicate a NethServer instance to other hardware?
I agree with @ElementZero that it would be a great addition if a 2nd or even 3rd, 4th… DC would be possible in 1 network. Either on the same location, or on sublocations connected through VPN.
Sure if you’d like to add me to the @Education that’d be fine
Yeah if you read the link @mrmarkuz posted, HotSync uses the term “Slave” to mean a DR server, not a true Slave like a BDC. Still, it’s better than nothing.
The main problem I have with no BDC is that if the PDC dies it will undoubtedly cause issues for the machines in the domain until it’s either brought back up or some DR server (like this HotSync) is turned on. Given that, I’m afraid I can’t recommend NethServer to be used in place of a real Windows Server yet. HotSync talks about ensuring MariaDB or PostgresDB is online and I saw other forum posts about samba not having the ability to work in something like a PDC/BDC relationship. Frankly I find those issues to be less of a concern than user authentication if AD went out or DNS issues - but perhaps that’s just me. Ideally you would have samba and a database run on a different server anyways in a real environment (again, perhaps just my opinion).
Anyways, not trying to cast a shadow on NethServer - I still think its amazing what it can do and I think it’s a wonderful alternative for budget domains, but just giving my take on it at this time
. It is a bit of a learning curve after being more familiar with Puppy Linux and Turnkey Linux, but it seems to be the best solution for my current project.
