The Lands Council

The Lands Council is an environmental 501(C)(3) organization based in Spokane, Washington. Their mission is to protect the woods, water, and wildlife of the Inland Pacific Northwest.

Phase One

In spring of 2000 I went to work getting the Lands Council office networked via DSL and Linux servers. The Lands Council (here after known as TLC) had five workstations (1 Windows, 4 Macs) that needed Internet access. Their former system, which I mercifully took out behind the barn and shot, was composed of an older version of Vicom Gateway running on a 8100 PowerMac and an old Mac LC running FirstClass, an email server. The LC would periodically prompt the 8100 to make the dial-up Internet connection so it could pass mail back and forth from a remote mail host. The 8100 would also make periodic connections to the Net to support Web client requests. This whole set up was shaky at best and the adopted child of a former executive director.

Back at Christmas of 1999, I was asked to pull the system back to life after it choked on a large email attachment from the outside world. I took one look at the system and said "Linux."

Linux plays well with Macs and Windows computers. It also has better network admin tools (Mac OS X is now UNIX-based, so some of the same tools are available there). Best of all, once the system was up and running I could do the maintenance work from afar via SSH (Secure Shell). One of the nice features with SSH is that I can run graphical applications through it and take advantage of the encrypted system. This means I could fire up a graphical web browser remotely running on the P166 in Spokane and see the display on my machine at work in Seattle if I needed to test something.

I got an old 486 for free and a P166 and configured them to be firewall and domain name server/web proxy. The firewall would do packet filtering at the kernel level, so no need for it to be anything bigger than a 486, and the P166 would be there as a local nameserver and web cache. This dramatically sped up their network, even without the DSL.

We got DSL installed and the whole office was off to the races! TLC sends out quite a few email action alerts to its members. I installed the Apache web server, Postfix, an email server, and Mailman, a mailing list application, on the P166. Mailman is administered via a web browser. The office admin and the Program heads could add and delete members to the alerts list on their own through this interface. And since Postfix was there to handle the list traffic I decided to have all of the users configure their email clients (a mix of Netscape Mail and MS Outlook) to use the P166 to send their outgoing mail.

Everyone from staff to board members were quite happy with the speed and stability of this new set-up.

Phase Two

TLC decided to switch offices to a more convenient downtown location. I helped them move all of the machines and used the time to reconfigure their network at bit. A month or two before the move the 486 firewall machine suffered a meltdown after well over a year of faithful service without ever needing a reboot. That kind of uptime is rarity in the Mac and Windows world. After a brief diagnosis over the phone, I realized the hard drive have breathed its last breath. I needed to quick solution to get them back up and running. A quick search of th Internet and I decided on Freesco (www.freesco.org). There are not many operating systems that fit on a floppy disk these days, but Linux is one. The Freesco project is one of a few micros distributions of Linux targeted as a free replacement for commercial routers. It comes with both a command line and web control interfaces. It was extremely easy to create the floppy and configure. Picture this: The stalwart staffers of this nonprofit were without connectivity for a day. The Internet is an increasingly important nerve center for so many for-profit and nonprofit firms today that having a reliable connection is a must. I walked in, put the floppy in the failed machine, booted it up, and configured it. I bounced a signal off a remote host like yahoo.com to test the connection and then announced that they were back in business. Over the next few months the flow of their work was supported by a little old 486 machine running off of a floppy disk. That was another happy day.

Right after the move the executive director of TLC asked me if they could use donated machines. A local corporation was giving away old Pentiums to NPOs that wanted them. I said tell them you want at least six. Though the 486 was running fine, I didn't want to rely on the floppy without having a local person knowledgeable about networking on hand to step in if there was a problem. I decided to use the donated machines to beef up the security and enhance the intranet with more features and services. Also I have a plan down the road to centralized some of the office applications on a single server and thought the donated machines would make good terminals for volunteers and staff that just need to do email, word processing, etc.

The process is still in transition. The current enhancements are a stronger firewall system, DHCP, group calendaring, and automatic synchronization between their remote web site and their web site content store on a machine there in the office. There is also public file sharing among the Windows and Macs by one central server.

The dollar savings in using this set up is over $15k and this number decreases the longer this setup is in use. There are no per user upgrade costs for bug fixes and new features that come with proprietary software packages every six months to a year.

Free/Open Source software and a little imagination have gone a long ways into enhancing the technological capacity of this organizations.

-Darryl Caldwell