Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 11:56:27 +1030 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: "The Varney's" <KingKong@madbbs.com>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: H.S. networking (beginners) Message-ID: <19990303115627.Q441@lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <000701be6509$2fc67980$41c494cd@KingKong>; from The Varney's on Tue, Mar 02, 1999 at 07:02:53PM -0500 References: <000701be6509$2fc67980$41c494cd@KingKong>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Tuesday, 2 March 1999 at 19:02:53 -0500, The Varney's wrote: > Our school is trying hard to keep up with computer technology. We are in > the process of networking our classrooms, business lab, CAD drawing lab, > computer lab, libraries, and administrative offices. We currently have the > administrative offices networked with a basic server (4 gig hard drive 64 > RAM). With our current budget we have put in 5 drops in all the rooms > (approx. 30 rooms)- (labs have more) with internet in two of the labs. We > will be adding a bigger server soon to better handle the new drops. > > What we are looking for is: Putting in Novell or similar to handle both > Mac and IBM compat PC's This sounds like yesterday's solution. > Lotus for inter room > messaging A bad idea. Lotus gives even stranger formatting than your Outlook, which is bad enough. Excuse me while I fix it... Was: > An antivirus program > And a program for > security > The ability to use both > Mac and PC programs on the same system > The ability to access > the internet from all pc's > Share printers Presumably intended: > An antivirus program > And a program for security > The ability to use both Mac and PC programs on the same system > The ability to access the internet from all pc's > Share printers You'll find more information on this kind of problem at http://www.lemis.com/email.html. > We (technology committee) are looking into different OS systems and are > interested in FreeBSD, but are not quite sure how this system will work for > us. I have had several people from FreeBSD (supporters?) e-mail me,quite > promptly, with lots of information. Though all the e-mail has been > informative, I'm still not sure how we can intagrate FreeBSD into our > system. Well, your requirements look very Microsoft-centric, so there's not much for FreeBSD to do. Let's see... > An antivirus program FreeBSD doesn't have viruses, so it doesn't have anti-virus programs. I believe some people offer virus scanners for Email destined to Microsoft machines, but I can't say much about them. > And a program for security You'd need to be more specific. > The ability to use both Mac and PC programs on the same system You can't do that, since the hardware (including the processor) is different. > The ability to access the internet from all pc's That's straightforward enough if they're running FreeBSD. If not, it's not our concern. > Share printers No problems with FreeBSD. You can also use Samba to have FreeBSD as a print server for Microsoft. Probably the reason you didn't get a reply the first time is that you're looking at this from the existing point of view (and, IMO, with some rather old-fashioned solutions even for the Microsoft environment, such as Novell and Lotus). Under these circumstances, there's not much for us to say. Though we like to help, we (and I in particular) don't have much to do with Microsoft. I suspect what you *should* do is go back a step or two and analyse what your real requirements are, independent of software platform. Then you could look for the best solution for each function. FreeBSD is good for networking, so you might like to have it as your Internet gateway, firewall, web server, DNS server and mail server. You can find lots of details about these functions in the online handbook or in my book "The Complete FreeBSD". If you then have specific questions, you can expect a rather better reply than you've had so far. Greg -- When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html See complete headers for address, home page and phone numbers finger grog@lemis.com for PGP public key To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19990303115627.Q441>