Institution: Joe Gqabi District Municipality (Local Govt)
Submitted by: Llewellyn Gush
Not all the below systems are fully utilised. eg The mail server, no-one uses the resource allocation function, and only a few use the calendaring function
We work in a very distributed environment with offices in all our towns (13 towns & 35 office locations). The office a linked back to the Main Office in Barkly East via a local service provider that uses Wireless links. We buy dedicated bandwidth and link in via a VPN on the System.
Mail Server
Zimbra Mail server, and calendaring system
• Mail server utilising IMAP and SSL for SMTP
• Zimbra web client for webmail
• Zimbra Web Admin interface
• Calendaring links to Mozilla Thunderbird
DRP and Backups / File servers
Linux as file servers for backups and saving of files
Owncloud for backups of local computers. Excellent solution
Financial/HR System backups – Rsync with custom scripts depending on the dbase.
Cygwin – I mention this as I install it on the Windows servers as I can use rsync/cron for backups. These are also scripted with a custom scripts.
EDMS
Alfresco Community version for
• Document management.
• Document Sharing
• Blog
• Wiki
Desktop Productivity Suite
Big exposure to Libreoffice, only use MS office where directly required by eg Finance
National Treasury are a serious offender in this space as they do not accept OSS solutions AT ALL.
Firewall
ClearOS Community edition
• Firewall – Iptables
◦ Incoming/Ougoing
◦ Custom Firewall rules
◦ Port forwarding
◦ OpenVPN – Remote access for service provider support, and Management. Excellent solution
◦ Snort – Intrusion detection
• Squid proxy
• Dansguardian – URL Scanning
Network/Device Monitoring
Used Nagios until the server loaded with this crashed. Have to check the current status of device monitoring and decide what to use and then setup new server.
Virtualisation
Have KVM initialised on some of my servers. Very impressive in my space. Won’t be investing in any more VMWare licenses unless there is no option.
Websites
• Joomla
• WordPress
Web Enabled Applications
These applications are built on the LAPP stack
• Linux
• Apache
• Postgres/PostGIS
• PHP/Javascript/Java
The Applications themselves are not OSS as they are owned by the developer who has chosen not to opensource them. There are however no license fees payable going forward. The functionality is as below. All the modules are interlinked where the functionality is required.
• Incident Management system/Customer Care
• Asset Management (Full system Grap and MSCOA compliant)
◦ Asset details – engineering
◦ Asset Details – financial
◦ Asset Details ownership
◦ Asset Detail – Location
◦ Job cards
▪ Job costing
▪ Personnel used
▪ Plant used
▪ Asset Replacements/Condition assessment etc
▪ Documents relating to each
• PostGIS/Mapserver OSS GIS solution linked to every function that requires a spatial location. QGIS used for updating/editing etc any records directly in the Dbase if required. Locations can also be modified from within the system
• Project Management – incidentally done for National Treasury to track their projects, Modified for Municipal requirement
• Fleet management
◦ Reminders of license renewal
◦ Trip authority
◦ Fuel usage
• Mobile interface for every one of the above modules. This also serves to make asset verification easier as a Bluetooth scanner can be linked to a device and the asset is verified in the system live.
Hardware Re-Purposing
As a Municipality money is in short supply. I have reloaded all my ancient laptops (XP based mostly, some Win 7) with Linux Mint. The users that get these are usually technical personnel. Their needs are Email, Internet, Basic spreadsheets and Documents.
My technical staff always ask. Why is it that when a person gets a Linux laptop do we never see them again…… They almost never break. Beyond the familiarisation required to know how to find the apps in the menu’s they are never seen until the laptop finally breaks down.