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Re: [Debian-NP] Introducing "stichting cd-uitleen", a non-profit music library organistation



Hi,

I just did some experimenting and had a couple of ideas. On our university they use NFS to make your home directory the same on every machine. Something like that could be usefull for scaling the thin client aproach.

You could have one fileserver with home directories and backup etc. (Maybe even a backup fileserver) There can be more application (debian) pc's which map the right home directories and have identical programs as the server.

Users can login and work directly on an application server / workstation. Or a user can login to an application server with the thin client approach. (eg, using xdmcp, vnc or something like that). This has some advantages. You can scale more easily by adding application pc's. In fact, they could all be this. But some organisations might be stuck with some windows dependencies in some programs. They could use the thin client approach from a windows client to have it both. This enables a more smooth migration path and is more likely to succeed.

I installed cygwin on win98. It was a bit slow on our 10 mbit network, vnc might perform better. We will be upgrading to 100 mbit this year anyway.

Just some ideas...

Cheers,
Remco.


On Wed, 16 Jul 2003 14:51:09 +0200
Remco Seesink <r.a.seesink@student.utwente.nl> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I would like to introduce Stichting cd-uitleen. It is located in Enschede, The Netherlands. We are an non profit organization with about 90 volunteers and a few paid workers. We have a few thousand of customers. A huge collection of music. Our goal is to provide a wide range of music to the general public.
> 
> http://www.cd-uitleen.nl
> 
> I have been reading on this list and the project sounds very interesting. I would like to take the opportunity to introduce you what we do / need in our IT infrastructure and see where it goes from there.
> 
> I am head of a group which is writing a replacement for our old dos-based custom software. This is a huge project and is already about 3 years actively in development. We intend to build software for:
> 
> * Customer software (search etc.)
> * Desk library work
> * Collection management (purchase etc.)
> * Personel management
> * Statistics
> * Archiving software (not all cd's fit in our exposition space)
> * Financial management
> * Software for managing late returned items.
> 
> It will be based on a mix of sql, php, xml, xsl (sablotron) with the firebird database as backend. Apache will be the webserver. This should make our software very portable on the server side. On the client side it's even simpler, you need a browser. 
> 
> This should prevent similar problems we now have with with the old dos based software which barely runs on win98. We plan to finish the project next summer. We have not yet decided if we would make this software publicly available. It is very specific to our organization and it might not be that useful anyway.
> 
> I am also involved in administration of more common software in the cd-uitleen. A short list of our current setup.
> 
> Debian file server
> 10 Win98 clients (we need to use self written dos programs at this time)
> Debian firewall
> Debian development platform client/server
> win XP development platform client
> 
> On the win98 we currently have a mix of the following applications:
> * Microsoft office:
> 	* Acces: Experimental project for personnel management which is 		 now actually used.
> 	* Word
> 	* Excel
> 	* Outlook
> * Open office
> * Antivirus software
> * Acrobat reader
> * Mozilla, Internet explorer
> * a simple terminal client program for checking registration of   customers.
> * External windows based music purchasing software
> * Power archiver (Zip etc.)
> * probably some more I forgot.
> 
> Also important are:
> * Good backup procedures. Offsite as well as onsite backups.
> * Low licensing costs. All money saved here means extra music for the library or lower prices.
> * User friendliness. we have a wide range of workers/volunteers and they are not all computer literates.
> * Ability to shield PC's from abuse. Very important on public search computers. Also important to protect the installation from abuse by volunteers.
> 
> At this moment we are forming a new network administration group. The first task of this group is to come up with a new approach for our setup. Currently the win98 clients are very unstable and take a lot of time to maintain. Our file server will be replaced by a dual file server which will be synchronized  with rsync for live backup purposes. I will point the new group to this e-mail and mailing list since I personally believe this is the way to go on the long term for us.
> 
> Cheers,
> Remco
> 
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