community involvement

One of my strong beliefs is that all schools should have access to computing, and that it should be cheap or preferably free. Most of the township schools can't afford what people like M$ charge for software. And with work, open-source software can do exactly the same thing.

I was approached at the begining of 2001 to do exactly this. Nyaluza.ecape.school.za is the result of this. They won themselves 16 computers and some switches from 3COM. 15 of them are in a teaching lab, and one of them runs their network.

Nkosi (meaning "chief" in Xhosa) is a FreeBSD server that uses Samba to provide home directories and act as a domain controler. It also runs a QMail mail server, with full anti-virus scanning, and mailing lists. In addition it does printer accounting using some funky scripts I wrote to interface to MySQL and GhostScript. It also has as a Squid caching proxy server and and an Apache web server. nyaluza.ecape.school.za DNS is served using djbdns.

All free, all running on one Celeron 600.

I wrote a paper on this for a conference in 2002.