Thank you to all for your replies. I will try to answer as much as I can to paint a more compete picture. Yes, our IT department is small for a school system with 11,800 students. Most of us, myself included, are teachers who were pretty tech saavy and pulled from the classroom. We are hired this way because the way our rules of operation are at present anyone working without a teacher's license would be stuck at teacher's aide pay and no benefits. Nedless to say, we do not attract talent in our department on that. Somehow we make it all work on no training and no other experience. I have been doing this job since 1997. I came into the job as a Mac tech and am now the data admin for our student management system--PowerSchool.
We are acctually using the free version of VMware on a few of our boxes and some of the servers I maintain are virtual. I can functioin in this environment, but I would love to have a deeper understanding of how it all works. I feel we could do so much more if we only knew how. I began to dig into Linux after Apple made the jump to UNIX in Mac OS X. I have enjoyed it and learned a lot, but I suffer from not having any background and not having many ways to put what I learn into practice. This is at the root of my plea for help. I see things I want to do for our school system and see how I could accomplish it, but trying to set things up given my level of inexpertise is a frustratingly slow process. Take the email goals I mentioned as an example. Our email is hosted by RackSpace through our ISP. For the most part that works just fine. My boss uses Mailman to send email out to all users in our school system. It is hoosted by someone else and we will lose it soon. We have to do something. Additionally, PowerSchool sends out mass email to parents as progress reports. This can happen daily, weekly, or monthly (parent's choice). RackSpace doesn't like this and says we are spamming because it violates their user agreement. Communication with parents is an important part of doing business for us and this is definitely not spam. It's also not anything like you would use Mailman or MailChimp for because each progress report is individualized for each student with their particulat claasses and assignments listed. I really need to set up a mail server just to handle the mail from PowerSchool and our internal list serv. I somehow got one up and running, but how do I harden it so that someone doesn't relay from it? How do I keep everything backed up in case we have hardware failure and I need to restore? What in the world do all those logs mean when I look at them to see if things are running normally or not? I could go on. The heart of my queestion is this: will someone please teach me to fish? Joe -- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/nlug-talk?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "NLUG" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
