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Date:      Mon, 23 Apr 2001 09:32:27 +0930
From:      Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com>
To:        FreeBSD advocacy list <FreeBSD-advocacy@FreeBSD.org>
Subject:   Re: regarding your feb2001 daemon's advocate
Message-ID:  <20010423093227.K25914@wantadilla.lemis.com>

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FYI.  The article he refers to is at
http://www.daemonnews.org/200102/dadvocate.html.  The relevant part of
the text is:

  Some time ago I reported on the computing environment at my daughter
  Yana's school (see the section ``No programming, please'' at the
  bottom of the article). In particular, I complained about the
  arbitrary rules they applied. Well, this year we got another form to
  sign (we had refused to sign the last one), and it was a lot
  better. They still talked about hacking utilities, but the nonsense
  like deep directories was gone, so we signed it.

  On the other hand, Yana has her own laptop (running FreeBSD, of
  course), and it has an Ethernet card. So one day when I had to go to
  her school anyway, I brought her laptop with me, and we went to the
  library to see if we could connect.

  We had the usual problem: find a live Ethernet jack. The obvious
  thing to do was to disconnect a running machine. Before doing so, I
  looked at the screen. That didn't look like Microsoft. In fact, it
  looked like an unconfigured X display with Netscape running. On a
  hunch, I pressed Ctrl-Alt-F1 and read:

    FreeBSD/i386 (dhcp1299.strathalbyn.edu.au) (ttyv0)

    login:

  I laughed so hard that Yana tells me I went bright red in the
  face. And of course we had no trouble connecting to the network. It
  was handy, though, to have the Netscape on the FreeBSD box to tell
  us how to set the proxy.

  What was that about the imminent demise of BSD? 

Greg

----- Forwarded message from Duncan Sayers <duncan@apdata.com.au> -----

> Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 23:06:05 +0930 (CST)
> From: Duncan Sayers <duncan@apdata.com.au>
> To: grog@lemis.com
> Subject: regarding your feb2001 daemon's advocate
>
> You will be pleased to know (if you aren't already aware) that the freebsd
> network you referred to at the end of your article at Strathalbyn
> school/community library is part of a larger network that spans the state
> from Ceduna to Mt. Gambier, and most places in between. I was part of the
> project that installed freebsd servers and public access clients to around
> 80 regional libraries throughout the state.  The servers have a 20MB flash
> drive in them, from which the server can rebuilt itself should it detect a
> problem with the hard drive that may have been caused by a dodgy power
> outage (flakey rural power supply being one of the biggest problems that
> had to be overcome).  The public access clients are also running a minimal
> freebsd setup, loading netscape from the server when they reboot. If the
> setup on the clients get messed up, either accidentally, or deliberately
> by the public, the librarians only need to reset the client and it will
> refresh itself.
>
> At ADC (the company I work for), we use freebsd almost exclusively.  Time
> and time again, we are demonstrating how you can make freebsd jump through
> hoops to acheive solutions that are simply impossible to do with the
> surprisingly more popular alternatives.
>
> FreeBSD is alive and well in the state of South Australia.  Nay-sayers be
> damned!
>
> Regards
>
> Duncan Sayers

----- End forwarded message -----

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