What Perry Morrison mentions below is probably fine for the smaller one-computer offices as he says. Each solution does have its merits that make it more suitable for different situations.
The system in my proposal is a server intended for larger sites with a number of machines, and its main aim is to make communications easier in such a situation by automating the dialout delivery, and pickup process (eg can be done early in the morning when local phone system is not overloaded and thus very noisy with dropped calls, no connection, busy signals, as it typically can be, saving staff time, money and frustration), as well as providing a central documents repository with scripted nightly drive mirroring. This will provide extra backup security, as well as making the system fixable by a screwdriver-only PC technician in event of most failures. It also will have a WWW front end for setup, with most settings set to standrad sensible defaults. the ones that have to be set up for most sites would be in a simpler WWW frontend which is all most users will have to see. A UPS will be needed of course. Not being critcial of what he says, here are my first-hand experiences of UUPC. I have used UUPC a lot in the past through my first Usenet/Internet use 10 years ago and had to deal with it last of all for some older customers at the ISP I used to work for. One of the problems it has is that it can die inexplicably and be pretty hard to resurrect even for a highly experienced DOS user. It can also be very hard to install if you have to venture beyond the limits of its install batch file or third party addon mailer packages (pegasus mail for DOS etc). The Linux system above has a far more robust UUCP implementation which performs faultlessly and has features like automatic partial file transfer resume, and automated multitasking call scheduling ability for 2AM etc. in the morning (cheaper toll calls). This will be easy to install via the install CD I propose to build, and easily configuarble by the WWW front end. By limiting the hardware to PCI machines and NOT trying to get X windows GUI to run almost all the device driver problems for the task at hand are removed. The above are the reasons that Linux is better suited for larger sites, and ffor where you need reliabilty. One of the aims of the project is to remove the install hurdle that Dr Morrison mentions via the CDROM and WWW front end, which from my experience I know definitely can be done. Best Regards, Matthew Grant On Tue, 2002-02-12 at 19:42, Dr. Perry Morrison wrote: > This is an interesting idea, but there are probably easier ways than > Linux. The latter is notorious for its hassles with device support - > usually OK if you know what you're doing - but if the Linux expert isn't > there to install on the spot or the box isn't configured before > delivery, you may have problems with the local hardware. > > In addition, if you don't really want to webserve or run a lot of LANS, > but just want office software and mail exchange, in my experience an old > laptop with DOS, some shareware that handles common document formats and > UUPC utilities for mail exchange will do fine. ------------ ***GKD is an initiative of the Global Knowledge Partnership*** To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd Archives of previous GKD messages can be found at: <http://www.globalknowledge.org>
