I feel drawn into this discussion since I am the IS Admin at Heritage Christian Academy Wayne has made mention of and I believe there are many more out there like me. My first job at the school is Information Systems Administration. I am a Pastor by training. You can imagine how many tech classes I had in my schooling. You can probably also imagine what a small private school could offer to a trained IS person. Very few of you would take a second glance at my salary. I do hold a number of other positions at the school - I teach High school Bible classes and computer electives. I even drive one of our buses. Why do I do this? - I believe in the mission of the school. Why do I think others would take the time to learn Linux? - Because they believe in the mission of their organizations. I believe that at HCA we are coming to a cross roads. We have approximately 100 computers in use, 60 for staff and 40 for students. Probably 80+% don't meet the minimum requirements for XP. If I remember correctly, next summer Microsoft will stop supporting Win98 which is what 98% of our computers run on. As a non profit we can not afford to throw anything away that works. Since the majority of my staff uses their computer for word processing and email I may be "forced" to start changing over our older PC's to Linux. Even if we were to receive a number of newer machines as donations we still could not afford the OS's for them. So over the past 4 years HCA has gone from 8 office computers on a peer-to-peer network with no internet access with myself only being part-time at the school. to having 100 computer all with internet access, a Gateway/Firewall/Router server, two file serves (one for the staff & one for the students), and an Email/Web server. All the servers are running Linux by the way. I started with no Linux experience to now maintaining and managing all of them with less and less help from Wayne. I do not think I am alone in going down this path. I also think others would gladly follow if they had someone like Wayne in their lives. I simply want to offer to someone else what Wayne has offered to our school - someone willing to help them to get up and going. So I ask two things: First, if you know of an organization that could use your expertise and you believe in their cause, please offer it. Second, if you know of any way you can help us, suggestions, resources, interested parties, please pass that along. Doug Coats _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota http://www.mn-linux.org tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list