[Durham] Request for help...

[Rick Trotter]

Hello everyone,

I've got a bit of a plea for help here if anyone is able to assist...

I have about 3 weeks before I start my new job as Network Manager of a 
school in Stockton and after doing a few hours surveying the site & 
checking out what is in there, I've noted areas that are in desperate 
need of attention, but my budget is non-existent (anyone working in 
education can attest to this fact!)

If anyone has any server racks (half height or full height) that they or 
their business is about to skip, I'm desperately seeking one or two to 
move equipment off benches and into racks - I'm donating my own gear to 
be used at the school to help plug the gap (I've got a couple of servers 
that are useful for DNS / Webservers, but I gave away my half-height 
rack to an ex-student of mine) - if anyone has anything they think "yeah 
I don't want that anymore" or "my company would prefer to donate this 
gear rather than pay for recycling it / skipping it" could you please 
let me know via email - my school email is: 
trotterr at ianramsey.stockton.sch.uk or back to this email address.

Half height / Full Height Racks - don't necessarily have to have front 
/back/sides but have to be able to take full depth server, not a comms rack
Servers - 1U/2U boxes that would be useful for linux boxes running 
Apache/MySQL/Smoothwall
10/100/1000 Network switches - ideally managed rack-mount (there's no 
redundancy on the network at present)
19" Rack shelving to place non-rackmount server pc's on.

I can arrange to pick gear up - heck I'll pay myself to rent a van if I 
can move the school IT on... I'm hoping to roll out more Open Source 
across the school which it already has been using it to great effect - 
any freebie gear I manage to acquire will mean the IT support team can 
push forward with OSS initiatives. The schools is excited about 
installing the latest version of Moodle and I'm hoping to use some of 
the gear to do MySQL mirroring / Apache offloading from the current 
Moodle server.



If you can help, please let me know - I'm sure we've all benefited in 
the past from some donated gear, let's pass that help on to the next 
generation of techies and geeks and teach them that Linux has a place in 
every corner of the world!

Rick