internal mail server

[scalez]

not sure if this should be here or o/s, but here we go:

i work for a k-12 school district as one of the "computer guys" (desktop, server, network, phone, kitchen sink . . .) focused mainly on windows machines. like so many bosses do, mine had an epiphany and told me to basically "make it work." then he added "and try to do it for little or no cost, as we didn't budget for it." oh, and he would like to use linux, so we can say we have a linux server.

the idea goes like this: we would like to institute a separate e-mail environment for student use only (e.g. students.district.org) for the students to use to communicate with other students and with faculty. this would be using a webmail interface, and possibly accessible from outside the network via a webmail interface, but unable to send and receive messages to address that are not either @district.org or @students.district.org.
weee.

i've got an old dual pIII 650 server that is still serviceable, and had 2k server on it that is going to be my little donor. i'm still a windows guy, as that's what i work on, but so far, i've only dabbled in Linux. i've found Hmail which i could install on windows, and i've also found a Ubuntu linix/ Hula that i thought i'd try. my biggest concern is ease of administration, as i will not be the only one over the box, and some of my co-workers are more windows oriented than i am.

any suggestions or guidance is greatly appreciated.

 

[Fint]

Red Hat, Debian, etc would all work just fine for your environment. There are many very good webmail packages (such as Squirrel Mail, Horde IMP, etc) that are easy to use.

 

[oakfan52]

Ubuntu is defnaitley one of the easier OSes to install and configure. The hardest part will be installing an securing your e-mail server package. there are plent to choose from. Postfix, Qmail, and sendmail are prob the most common. google will be your best freind. the other requirements should be easy to configure.

No with that said I would no reccomend using the GUI (ubuntu is based off debian). I would run all CLI for performance on that older box. I would just run Debain.

 

[LittleMe]

Remeber that in providing these services to students you'll want to get approval from their parents before giving them an account and you'll have to be able monitor all communication between students and archive it incase you get sued or some such. Best bet would be to talk with your district lawyers to see what you need to do before you do it, otherwise, your district might not be so happy with the free email if it costs a crap load if they get sued. It's a nightmare working in k-12 and what you have to be aware of as you do it. At any rate, good luck. I don't think we'll be giving our kids email anytime soon, too much to worry about right now.

 

[scalez]

Remeber that in providing these services to students you'll want to get approval from their parents before giving them an account and you'll have to be able monitor all communication between students and archive it incase you get sued or some such. Best bet would be to talk with your district lawyers to see what you need to do before you do it, otherwise, your district might not be so happy with the free email if it costs a crap load if they get sued. It's a nightmare working in k-12 and what you have to be aware of as you do it. At any rate, good luck. I don't think we'll be giving our kids email anytime soon, too much to worry about right now.

yes, we already require parent/guardian approval for all computer access, and that includes useage policy and the standard lawyereese. that's also the reason we are going to lock down communication outside our environment. it is supposed to be a teacher/student and student/student communication tool.

No with that said I would no reccomend using the GUI (ubuntu is based off debian). I would run all CLI for performance on that older box. I would just run Debain.

hrm. this was our old exchange 2k box, and could run our little 800+ mailbox environment fine. are the nix based solutions that hardware dependant? i'm just newb enough in linux to still like having a gui handy.

 

[ranstlin]

A linux box would be fine for that. If exchange can run it then a linux box could definately run it and better.

There are tons of user guides for setting these types of things up. Gentoo has a very large user forum and tons of guides on their website for setting up these types of servers.

However, any of the distros would be able to do it just fine. I'd recommend either CentOS, Debian or Gentoo.

 

[scalez]

ok, i'm going to over research some other distros, too i just had ubuntu downloaded for some reason, and found a guide to setting up hula on it.

 

[Nasty_Savage]

Look into Suse too. As for giving students e-mail....bad idea. I too work for a k-12 school district. We are even actively blocking webmail to aol and othe mail accounts. Too much of a distraction to classes.

 

[scalez]

yea, we don't actively block those things, since the students are only on computers in the labs, library, or business classes. but we have a fairly robust anti virus, anti spyware, anti spam, and firewall/proxy setup. heck, bandwidth isn't going to be much of a problem . . .we have fibre between the campuses and gigabit backbones to all of the switches.

and again, they can't send or recieve from out of district (the plan) so it can only be used in student to student or teacher to student communication. so no big fw:fw:fw:fw: messages with a 6 meg attachment getting in, unless they create it in our environment which is both easy to trace back and covered by the accepted useage policy.

plus, that's my boss' problem, not mine i just have to make it workable

 

[LittleMe]

Nasty_Savage: I too have been blocking those sites becuase it's just too much of a problem.

scalez: We have good anti-virus on everything from the workstations to the ISA firewall with gigabit fiber backbones, the ISA box is doing http filtering and the whole nine yards but it's just been too much of a hassle with kids sending threats to each other via email, tons of myspace drama. I already, and I'm sure you do to, do enough as it is and can't keep ontop of everything. The time it's going to take out of your day to check all that mail to make sure they don't do anything wrong is going to waste your day. As is, I already spend enough time gonig through proxy logs. But, you will have to let us other K12 guys know how it goes.

 

[shaft]

to find a good setup head over to http://howtoforge.com and look at some of the "Perfect setup's" i used the Fedora setup http://howtoforge.com/perfect_setup_fedora_core_4 it uses ispconfig and has webmail

 

[scalez]

Nasty_Savage: I too have been blocking those sites becuase it's just too much of a problem.

scalez: We have good anti-virus on everything from the workstations to the ISA firewall with gigabit fiber backbones, the ISA box is doing http filtering and the whole nine yards but it's just been too much of a hassle with kids sending threats to each other via email, tons of myspace drama. I already, and I'm sure you do to, do enough as it is and can't keep ontop of everything. The time it's going to take out of your day to check all that mail to make sure they don't do anything wrong is going to waste your day. As is, I already spend enough time gonig through proxy logs. But, you will have to let us other K12 guys know how it goes.

well, we have some of those kids, too. most of the problems that we've had are the single porn incident every year, and every once in a while a threat. to combat this, we just remove all of their computer access we keep it in the privledge category, rather than a right. i think that the teachers supporting our position and doing some policeing has helped nip most of the problems in the bud . . . however i do see your point about it all getting out of hand.

i think that this is where policy and enforcement come into play. if they risk explusion for threating someone via electronic means, same as if they do it face-to-face, after the first one happens, it won't again. we want them to use it for both school business and personal communication . . . so we'll see.

and thanks for the links, shaft . . . checking out now

 

[DarkOne_BW]

not trying to hijack the thread, but I'd be interested in running some ideas by my fellow K-12 admins.

There are several things I've considered over the years in education... student email being one of them. Another one is the idea of integrating student chat into the curriculum for, oh... say, 7th grade english. Why just teach typing when you can teach proper grammar and keyboarding in a controlled session, not to mention the effect it would have when students get home and chat in the evenings?

Do you give every student a login name? I've seen some schools that don't even give TEACHERS individual logins

As "the computer guy/girl", do you find you have much say in how technology is used in the classroom, or do you end up being the "monkey labor" that cobbles the computers and servers back together? I'm also curious to know what your staff is like, in terms of the number of people in your department vs. total desktops and servers supported.

Personally I manage about 700 desktops, 35 servers, and 3 campuses that spread over 8 miles. I'm a one-man show. I've seen departments in universities that have similar setups and 15 personnel in the department. When I tell them the numbers of my network they're just stunned one person could do it. I couldn't if not for some of the more necessary utilities, like VNC (or ARD on Apple), and the fact that I centralize my home directories (which really helps when imaging workstations).

I'd love to get a list of everyone that is a k-12 admin together, so we could bounce ideas off each other as to what works in your school. Drop me a PM if you're interested.

 

[LittleMe]

At my main site I manage just over 500 boxes, with 12 servers and 2,500 users. These are all 9-12 grade. I also do work at other sites and will soon oversee our groupwise to exchange migration(FINALLY!) in which there will be 1,800 email accounts on a 2way cluster. At this point I'll also headup the backend for Active Directory in which there are 27 domains of which all but 4 are at their own site. I personally find that I have more say in how technology is used as in what we buy, where it goes, etc. Our department has a total 10 people which covers 17,000 users (about 15,000 students and 1,800 staff). There's no way I could do it with out GPO's and VNC, they save my life as well as ARD on the Apples. There's no way I'd ever want to give 15,000 students email though. As for student accounts, each student gets one when they hit middle school(6th grade) and all teachers have accounts.

 

[scalez]

not trying to hijack the thread, but I'd be interested in running some ideas by my fellow K-12 admins.

There are several things I've considered over the years in education... student email being one of them. Another one is the idea of integrating student chat into the curriculum for, oh... say, 7th grade english. Why just teach typing when you can teach proper grammar and keyboarding in a controlled session, not to mention the effect it would have when students get home and chat in the evenings?

Do you give every student a login name? I've seen some schools that don't even give TEACHERS individual logins

As "the computer guy/girl", do you find you have much say in how technology is used in the classroom, or do you end up being the "monkey labor" that cobbles the computers and servers back together? I'm also curious to know what your staff is like, in terms of the number of people in your department vs. total desktops and servers supported.

Personally I manage about 700 desktops, 35 servers, and 3 campuses that spread over 8 miles. I'm a one-man show. I've seen departments in universities that have similar setups and 15 personnel in the department. When I tell them the numbers of my network they're just stunned one person could do it. I couldn't if not for some of the more necessary utilities, like VNC (or ARD on Apple), and the fact that I centralize my home directories (which really helps when imaging workstations).

I'd love to get a list of everyone that is a k-12 admin together, so we could bounce ideas off each other as to what works in your school. Drop me a PM if you're interested.

well, we have about 1500 students over 5 regular campuses and 2 "alternative" campuses and about 400 faculty/admin folks just over 1000 desktops and 40 servers. including the boss, we have 5 people in the department, supporting all campuses. we are broken out by specialaty (hardware, software, network, and our webmaster) but we overlap alot.

every faculty position and all 7th-12th students have network accounts. below that, they are usually only on in a lab environment that is supervised, so they use group accounts that have no internet access.

we don't really direct how the teachers use technology, so much as try to enable them to use it. in our k-3 classrooms, we were able to get the teachers palm pilots so they could do standardized testing on it (state gave half ). i've also had english teachers that wanted to know if she could record on her computer to send CDs of the lessons home with some of her slower kids. she had a burner in the desktop that we just gave her, and i gave her some lessons on how to do it.

i'm a pretty good "out of the box" thinker, but i'm no teacher. i don't see myself (or my department) as directing how tech is used, so much as helping the teachers utilize it in new and different ways. i strike down crappy software all the time, because it's not well writen (or writen for windows 3.1 ported to 95 and kinda works on xp). i police some of the more flagrant policy violations, i fix it when it's broke, and i try to find new ways to make the tech more prevasive and less invasive to the teachers.

baa, now i'm rambeling . . . need more coffee.