Intro

[Michael Williams <michael@eclipse.haywood.k12.nc.us>]

Hello! My name is Michael Williams and I am the network technician for
Haywood County Schools located Waynesville, NC.  We have 15 schools with
about 7500 students. There are 34 LAN's, 20 of those are connected via a
WAN. Most of the servers are NW3.12. We have one each of  NW4.11, NT4.0
and a Sun running Solaris. The SUN box acts as our
proxy/filtering/cacheing/mail server. I also have 2 RH6.0 servers. All
our clients are Intel based running DOS/WIN3x or WIN95.

Now, why I am here - we are planning to replace 10 of our oldest servers
running NW3.12 with
new servers running NW5.0 or RH Linux 6.0. If I'm going to have to learn
a new NOS I'd rather learn linux. I've worked with other Unix's(AT&T,SCO
and Altos) over the years but haven't supported any in the last 4 years.
I've been playing with linux off and on for about 18 months now, mostly
at home, on computers built from old parts. I took one of them to work
and managed to get most of our curent software to run on it using
mars_nwe and Samba. We have to use the applications we currently have in
the beginning but as more software becomes available I'd hope we could
use more and more linux based apps.

I'm looking for suggestions and help. (Mainly with adding all those
users! ) I'm also looking for ways to help out the cause whenever I can.
I'm not a programmer (although I'm trying to learn) but I've been
servicing and supporting computers/networks for 15 years, the last 5 in
the local school system.

Thanks
Michael