Hi I work for a charity in the North East of England in the UK. We have a problem in that our IT resources have grown rapidly, but so far we have not been able to put the management of these resources, or the staff training in place in order to utilise these resources effectively.

One example of this is that we have a large number of machines with files belonging to various members of staff scattered over several desktops within the organisation. (When I say 'large' I mean in one specific location we probably have about 30 machines and a similar number spread over about 5 separate locations. I am however responsible (for the time being) only for the 30 machines at my current location).

I am somewhat new to this post and I work on a purely voluntary basis, but my observations of the IT Infrastructure (if one can be said to exist) of this organisation is that it is utterly dishevelled and completely disorganised.

Currently the way staff access files which are directly related to the running of the organisation, is to simply dump them on any random desktop that they might be working on and to then attempt to remember (at some point in the future) where exactly they might have put them.

The charity in question works predominantly with disadvantaged young people, providing access to ICT technologies and training - and a similar scenario is evident in this regard, with students having files, images, mp3 music files and all kinds of garbage scattered across their desktops. There is no sever side administration (and no central server) and literally no organisation evident whatsoever.

So... since I am new here and since I have volunteered, I thought I should probably do something to try to sort some of this mess out.

I do have some Linux experience. So I thought one way of sorting this out was possibly to use a Linux distro on one of the slightly older machines which ran a SAMBA and/or FTP server and organising staff files and student files into their own specific/unique directories. This way at least things might be a little more organised.

So (as well as being open to suggestions of possible other ways to sort this mess out) I am now currently in the market for a simple, easily manageable Linux distro that will give me fully functioning FTP/SAMBA/WebMin servers out of the box.

Oddly, probably one of the better distros that I have used (and still use regularly) is Gentoox - which runs on my old Xbox 1 as my home based file server. It pretty much gave me all of these facilities from the outset and required both very little configuration and very little maintenance. However (despite whatever some enthusiasts might say) my experience is that Gentoo in general might be a little too complex and involved for this kind of environment - and in any case I certainly can't use an old XBox as a central file server for a small to medium scale charity. So as I am somewhat familiar with it, I have opted to go with Ubuntu.

One other dilemma that we face is that we desperately need a way to share information (case files, accounts, progress reports and so on) not just between departments, but between different offices in different geographical locations too. Again I think FTP might be a good answer, but here's the rub, although I am trying to do the best job I can, I am by no means a professional. All of my experience to date (both Linux and Windows) has been home based. So hopefully you will forgive if I ask a potentially dumb question, which is specifically, how do I make a FTP server visible over the Internet?

Again when setting up a FTP server in the past I have always been satisfied to just have my files available locally on my own network. However despite several attempts I have never been able to access any FTP server I have configured over the Internet.

So my next question is, how exactly do I do that?

I don't think I can convince them to ditch Windows entirely, since part of the aim of the project is to expose these young people to as similar an environment to a common workplace environment as possible - and from their perspective (and probably with some cause) this means Windows. But as a Windows server licence costs probably way more than these folks can afford (or at least the money would be better spent on helping the kids) then hopefully I can at least help them organise things a bit better and possibly comminicate more effectively - and maybe use Linux to save them some money on a server licence.

Also which version of Ubuntu would you guys recomend? I know there is a server version and a Desktop version - but although I can to an extent work OK without a headless Linux install, the main IT guy there (who although he does his best isn't really a qualified IT admin either) would be likely to be very lost/confused by this.

I know it's even more of a long shot, but I don't suppose there are any good Linux admins on this forum from the North East of England who would be willing to help out either do you? As I said, I am by no means a professional, so any input at all (even just inso far as giving us a basic overview and breakdown of our needs) would be very helpful indeed.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can offer any help whatsoever. It's a shame that things have become so disorganised for this charity and I guess it's not ideal that I am all they have right now in terms of trying to put together some kind of consolidated IT strategy and/or infrastructure. But even if I can help organise things a little, it is likely to be a thousand times better than anything they have right now.

GJ

The charity in question also works with disadvantaged young people
There's a lot of possibilities but the ones you choose from a technological point of view may not be the ones that suits them best. What you should do before you do anything else is take stock of their shared needs and skills. Then you know if you could safely (user support, admin skills, system maintenance) feed them an all-in-one solution like for instance Citadel or if you can get away with sticking with stuff like SMB + FTP (which *any* decent, maintained distro can give you).

Well again the decision process isn't mine. I am literally very new there (4 weeks) and as far as I can tell a very odd decision had already been made, insomuch that the guy running IT there opted to replace all of the current (and probably perfectly adequate) machines within the project with 30 off the shelf Dell (essentially gaming) machines. (These are really quite beefy machines with powerful AMD dual core processors 1GB of RAM, 300GB HDD, Dual layer DVD burners, ATI X1300 dedicated graphics cards and so on).

The impression seems to have been that by simply replacing the older machines with the newer machines that this would somehow make the entire organisation run 'better' and more smoothly - although little or no thought seems to have been given as to exactly how this will occur.

If it was me I probably would have gone for a single integrated solution.

In any case my Linux skills are a little rusty, so if anyone can recommend a good usable Linux distro that will give me these facilities pretty much preconfigured out of the box, I will as I said be extremely grateful for any help you can offer.

From the psychological point of view (as in local office = local, remote office=remote), you might want to go with FTP between 'remote' offices (ie remote office server) and a terminal server approach within each office eg http://www.ltsp.org/ which definitely eases ctrl/management over 'local' systems.
Any modern distro eg RH Fedora Core should be fine, but be guided by the people at that link, who I have heard are quite helpful.
If you want to run true MS on the desktop instead of eg MS under Linux, you'll need to setup Samaba shares and have large signs up/training saying that anything stored on local 'C:' drives will be wiped during system re-boots.
Anything to be saved must be on the Samba drive.
With any robust solution, you'll have to do some training on usage. You'll need the management to back you up on this, or it'll all fall apart.
Polite but firm approach needed.

unfortunatley im not as knowledgable as many others here on LQ's, but i would like to say welldone for trying to make this happen

Sorry for the bump. But if you guys could read read over my initial (revised) post again, I would be extremely grateful.

raid517 mailed me off-forum (I'm one of the coordinators of a nearby LUG), and for the record I'm going to tell you how I replied.

This is exactly the kind of situation that a Linux User Group is there for, and raid517 did the right thing by getting in touch. We have many active members in the region, several of whom are involved in the provision or administration of IT to charities (using Linux, of course) and at least one of whom (that's me) is employed by a local government body that deals with young people, in the IT department. We might even be able to help in a literal hands-on manner. We are free (as in beer) to join, and we give our time freely.

I've invited him to come along to our next meeting, and to introduce himself on our mailing list. I'll also be watching this thread, of course, because LinuxQuestions isn't a resource to be ignored!

Brian Ronald
Tyneside Linux User Group

What about combining the PCs into a Linux cluster/grid with single database/ file server and create a multi seat using Betwin / Buddy or Multiseat on X.org?

You can use Aspeed Accelerant and Linux Cluster to increase the speed of Excel.

For terminal you can use existing keyboard and display, Power Over Ethernet or old donated PCs.

Lol, thanks! I have to say that when we meet you will probably have to explain the 'free beer' analogy to me - as in my experience beer is rarely free - unless of course someone buys one for you out of some form of common kindness or friendship - which I guess (hopefully) in this case may be an answer in itself.

Indeed an excellent opportunity to make clear what LUG's are for!
Hope this all works out well, keep us posted.
Maybe in the "Success stories" forum if it went *that* well.

It's not going badly. If raid517 manages to get to one of our meetings there's likely to be some very animated discussion - the mailing list has already seen some extensive discussion since he first posted there.

It really is a start-from-scratch situation. The on-going discussion can be followed on our web based mailing list archives at that link.