As seen on http://www.mandrakebizcases.com/ As the IT manager of a municipality located near Montreal, Quebec, Canada, I have taken on the responsibility of migrating our entire network to Mandrake-Linux. I chose Mandrake after trying out several other distributions, and preferred the product line and consistency provided by Mandrake, as well as the application choices provided in the Powerpack. We have recently completed a roll-out of 60 desktop workstations used in our public library, which are all running AMD Duron 750 CPU's on Asus A7V motherboards. These systems also include ATi Rage XL AGP video cards, 128Mb SDRAM, and 10Gb hard drives. Three additional computers, identical in configuration to the PC's (with the exception of 512Mb of SDRam), are currently running Mandrake SNF, which allows us to provide different levels of firewalling and Internet access restrictions to the Library's members and staff. As our T-1 connection is burstable, and expensive, these firewalls have already paid for themselves by drastically dropping our bandwidth costs. Four Servers, each equipped with Dual Intel P-III 866 Mhz CPU's, Tyan Tiger 133 Motherboards and 1 Gb of SDRAM, provide Database, File/Print, and Staff document Storage services. Two of these are currently "Clustered", and provide Web-site (Apache), Gateway, Proxy, SMTP and POP3 services, as well as "Port-Forwarding" to all other PC's and servers in the network. This allows my staff to utilize "Webmin" to provide remote administration and Techsupport services even when we're not on-site. The next phase of this project is a Compaq Alpha 600 Mhz Server for our new "Automation" system. This server will also be connected to 7 new staff PC's and 16 Thin-Client stations reserved strictly for the automation system. Provided by a company which specializes in this kind of system, the Compaq server will be running Tru64 Unix, and we expect it to merge smoothly into our Linux-Based Network. When we first started this project, we were running Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 (sp4) on our servers, and were constantly re-installing the O/S due to bad crashes. These same systems are running flawlessly now, and have been for 7 months. With the exception of four client PC's used for Graphics and specialty software, our migration is almost complete. We have reduced our O/S and software costs by 92%, and increased reliability by 400% ! The principal services used include Apache, Samba, Bastille-Firewall, Squid and Squid-Guard, with KDE and ICE for desktop environments, and OpenOffice as a replacement to commercial office suites. LTSP running on another server will handle the Thin Clients. One added bonus is the fact that we are virtually safe from virus attacks. Next-Stop - City Hall !