k12linux

The "semi-official" distribution of the K12Linux Project

The Multnomah Education Service District has successfully moved most of it's core network services to Linux. Linux powers dns, dhcp, mail relays, proxy servers, web filters, and directory services for the 45,000 administrators, teachers, and students within our agency and the school districts we support . For our agency and a couple of our districts, Linux powers the web, mail, ftp, and file servers. Tickled with our success, we have started work on putting Linux workstations in the classroom. More on that to come!


K12LTSP/K12linux version 6.0 has been released. This is a major over-haul, with a huge number of improvements. Read all about it at http://k12ltsp.org


With the passage of the Children's Internet Protection Act, filtering is something that most schools and libraries are going to have to deal with. MESD has been using a commercial web filter for the last two years. Recently we switched over to squidGuard and are very pleased with it. SquidGuard is completely free, is distributed under the GPL license, and is quite competitive with the expensive proprietary solutions we were using previously. We have posted simple installation and configuration instructions, as well as our blacklists, at http://squidguard.mesd.k12.or.us .


We've been doing a lot of work with OpenLDAP. This documentation is very outdated, but it may still be of interest:

We've started playing around with Linux-based routers. Take a Linux box running Squid & DHCP, slap in a WAN card, add a few IPCHAINS rules and you have a pretty sweet, inexpensive router. That's the theory anyways. If it works well in practice we may build more of these rather than buying new routers. The first one has been working great.

Slides/documentation from recent presentations: