I just wanted everyone to know that we are in our brand new 26,000sq ft library here in Abbeville and things are going great. Here is the rendering of the new library, I hope to get some actual pics up soon of our new library. http://www.vermilion.lib.la.us/progandev/newlib/ My office is the third window on the right side of the building. I finally got my own office and an actual server room for all of my equipment!
I had to use knoppix on some public machines the other day and I thought I would share the news. I managed to receive 6 compaq computers for the new library and I didn't find out until I went to hook them up that there were no hard drives in them. (honest mistake, they forgot to put them back in after transfering data to their new computers). So what was I to do... I had a grand opening and only two working public computers.....AH HA... Knoppix to the rescue. I setup one machine with a mapped printer and the ip address setup. I then saved the config to a floppy and put the floppy in the next machine.... changed the settings to the correct ip and saved the config to a new floppy...etc...etc...for each computer. Well, after almost two weeks of Knoppix for the public I can honestly say that they took to it well. We had very few people say "what the heck is this", and I had one guy say "hey cool, what distro is this, I have Red Hat at home". I think putting a button on the desktop that said "Internet" helped. Some people had trouble printing, and some wanted to know where the word processor was ( should have put an icon on the desktop that said "word processor") and some people logged out which rebooted the machine. The problem with rebooting is that you have to type in "knoppix floppyconf" at boot to get the settings off of the floppy. Other than that it worked out well. I really didn't like the fact that there are so many dangerous tools on the CD (ethereal, ettercap, etc...), but maybe one day I'll get around to making my "Kiosk Knoppix" CD for the general public. For now, the hard drives are in and they all came with W2k and I have centurion guard installed, which pretty much makes the computers bullet proof for now. Also, now that I have my 2 3com 4400 48 port switches, I can now have my LTSP server on it's own vlan which make it run really nice, and keeps the broadcasts in their own collision domain. I'm still using the LTSP to push out thin client card catalog kiosks that only run netscape on top of X, and I'm using iptables to limit them only to our website so people can search the card catalog but not do anything else on them. One of my next project is that my friend Kris and I would like to make the "Open Source Oven", which is basically a stand alone computer with a simple menu where you can pop in a blank cd and burn iso files of linux distros or cds like gnuwinII. I saw that someone in the slashdot article about libraries was throwing around the same idea also. We have been throwing this idea around for about about two years now, but neither of us are programmers and don't know how to tackle the interface. I am getting much better at shell scripting though so maybe I can make a nice text menu based system. The kicker is that I would like to build this computer right inside of something like a toaster oven! Well, thats pretty much everything I can think of for right now. I just thought I would drop in and fill everyone in on my adventures. Adam J. Melancon Systems Administrator Vermilion Parish Library http://www.vermilion.lib.la.us _________________________________________________________________ Check your PC for viruses with the FREE McAfee online computer scan. http://clinic.mcafee.com/clinic/ibuy/campaign.asp?cid=3963
