[TriLUG] Red Hat Launches Nation's First K-12 Red Hat Linux Education Program; Helps Improve Computing Access for All Students

[Tanner Lovelace]

On Wed, 2002-05-08 at 11:46, Chris Hedemark wrote:


> What's wrong with ssh?

Ssh is great, when you have a login on the box.  The whole thing
about Cyrus was that we were going to divorce the e-mail logins from
the shell logins, since Cyrus should be run on what is essentially a
black box, anyway.  So, no login, no ssh, but you still have imap.
 
> Funding?  I don't know if funding is a big problem.  The software we
> install is free.  The schools we would work with do have technology
> budgets (and apparently Orange County has a healthy enough budget to
> throw away several tractor trailer loads of Pentium-class PC's with
> perfectly good SVGA monitors).  Cash in the pizza coffers would be
> nice.  Other than that, I think it is a great example for the community
> how much we can do with so little money.  IMHO it's great punctuation
> for the statement about open source reducing licensing costs if we can
> show the community we eat what we cook for next to no money spent.

"Cash in the pizza coffers", I believe, is our biggest need, at the
moment.  However, it's always good to have something in case we
need it.  Just because most everything we do can be done for free
doesn't mean we don't need to worry about money.
 
> The thing I was working on part-time on fatalpha was a bug tracking
> system to manage to-do's, but it was geared more towards development
> projects.  I'd like to refocus that towards any sort of volunteer
> projects going on within the LUG to help ease the pains of coordinating
> volunteers (which is very much like herding cats).

Sounds like a great idea.
 
> One thing I would very much like to see more of in the coming year is
> more focus on services from our server farm and less focus on security. 
> Don't get me wrong.  Security is important.  But I think there was so
> much focus on security with fatalpha that the services it provided were
> not terribly convenient to use (especially the ftp mirror, which doesn't
> use ftp at all).  I'd like the next SC to take more of an approach of
> "what service do we want to provide?  and what is the most responsible
> way to do it?"  Over the years I've been able to contribute somewhat to
> that goal, for example setting up and maintaining the Mailman mailing
> list services that handle this mailing list and others for the LUG.  If
> elected onto the SC, I would like to further extend the services
> available to TriLUG members on our servers and make the existing
> services more accessible.

Making the services more accessible is a great idea, but you should
remember that if you back off the security too much you run the
risk of making them insecure enough for someone to break in and
mess everything up, thereby making the services non-existent. 
Security *is* important because without it you can't have any
services.

That said, I think more can be done with what we've got
than is currently being done.  That will be the challenge for
the incoming SC. :-)

Tanner
-- 
Tanner Lovelace | lovelace at wayfarer.org | http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
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