cunsolo.it Giuseppe Cunsolo webpages

During the last week I've been working on a new project concerning Drupal and my local Red Cross group.

Introduction

We actually have a room we use as “dispatch” (radios, phone lines/fax).
We used to have a old computer (donation), with a interactive map program of Catania. No internet connection.
This computer helped our volunteers 24/7 for 5 long years, and then, one day, quietly turned off and died. RIP.

We have to look at the future, don't we?

I've been thinking to migrate all the computers of our group to GNU/Linux for a long time. I just used this occurence to speed up the thing and push our chief to actually “do” this.
In two days of hard work, I grabbed the DSL from the administrative office, installed a switch and new data cables, and installed a GNU/Linux distro on each of those two “new” computers.

"Henry" and "Dunant"

How else would you call two new computers in a Red Cross group? :)
(this is the article of wikipedia about Henry Dunant)

Henry is a Pentium III with 512M RAM, 20G HDD and 2 ethernet cards.
It is a donation: it worked for a long time as small home server, here at my place.
After the installation of Ubuntu 8.04 server edition, it was placed in the administrative office (restricted access).
Henry is directly connected to the switch and then to DSL modem/router. It works as LAMP server, DNS local server, firewall and http “filter” with Squid and SquidGuard. Needless to say, I installed Drupal on it! :)
The drupal “core” of Henry will surely become a useful service for our group. Henry actually provides local group news, forums, image galleries, and a poll system.
Actually, our local Drupal website is intentionally blocked on the internet side. We want to test it extensively with our volunteers.
We plan to open it to everybody in the near future, as news and documentation website of our Red Cross group.

Dunant is a Duron with 256M RAM and 30G HDD.
It was previously located in another office of our Red Cross group.
After the installation of Kubuntu 8.04, Dunant was placed in our dispatch room. It is connected to the internet through Henry and thus the connection is filtered and firewalled.
KDE 3.5 is heavily locked down with the Kiosk feature. We used the Kiosk admin tool to configure it. Also, the standard user does not have permissions for USB devices and CD-ROM mount/access.
Dunant is used by the volunteer in charge for dipatch duties, to access online maps and street name search, to search/read news and docs, to write reports, to post on our local forums.
We installed the formerly-used map program as fallback, just in case.

Vito, another Red Cross volunteer, and Eriol, a member of Catania G/LUG, helped a lot with the software installation and configuration. Other people of Catania G/LUG helped with suggestions on our mailing list.

The works is not finished yet, we have to tune up the system and we have even more ideas waiting. But the whole thing is actually working like a charm, and this is awesome.

You can see pics and screenshots here.