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[Ahmik]

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 !