Midwestern Christian
Academy
January 30, 2007 by Alan McColl
Introduction
Midwestern Christian Academy
(MCA)
is a private (non-profit) PK-8 Christian School located on Chicago's
near Northwest side.
MCA is a ministry of Midwest Bible Church, where my family and I are
members. My seven year old daughter attends the second grade there and
loves it. MCA serves the local community which is of mixed ethnicity
and moderate income. The families represented at MCA are working people
concerned about providing their children with a quality Christian
education. MCA is mindful of the fact that the students' families don't
have a lot of disposable income. With that in mind, the tuition costs
are kept as affordable as is fiscally possible. The teachers at MCA are
there because they love kids and love the LORD. I could gush on and
on about the school and staff, but this article is about the computer
project.
Background
I first got involved with MCA in 2003 when my daughter was in Pre-K. I
forget the exact details, but somebody in the office found out that I
knew something about telephone systems and computers and asked me to
look at some of the computers in the "lab". The lab was a collection of
various PI and PII running Windows 95 and 98. These machines had all
been donated over the years and were used largely to teach keyboarding
to the upper grades. They were in various states of disrepair. Some had
corrupt OSs, some were missing system files (deleted by users), and
some had other hardware issues. The office staff also had four PCs. One
new PC running Windows XP Pro, and three older machines running Windows
98. Since there was no IT staff, only a couple teachers who were
helping out in their spare time, I decided to take on the task of
repairing and updating the computer systems at the school. Also, I
could earn some parent credit hours. Each family is required to
volunteer for a few hours each semester (I recently received a note
from the staff member who tracks the parent hours stating that I've
logged enough hours to see my daughter through graduation).
Getting Started
The first thing to do in the lab, was to repair and reload the OSs on
the various machines. There is not much you can do to prevent users
from accidentally, or deliberately, deleting files on Win 9X machines
since everybody is an administrator. Next, we received some funds from
the Century Club. The Century Club is a group from our church that
raises money through
donations for the purpose of helping provide the school
with things
that aren't budgeted. One year we received new windows. Another year it
was the heating system. We were able to purchase 10 refurbished PIIIs
loaded with Win2k with this money. We then obtained licences for Win98
and
Win2k from Microsoft through their fine
Fresh Start for
Donated Computers
program for the remaining donated PCs. This program provides licenses to schools for donated
computers at no cost. We now had 16
functioning PCs running Win98 or Win2k with Office 97.
Donated Server
My wife's company was bought out twice in two years. With each
aquisition came a new collection of network and server gear. Some old
equipment was left in the
wake. As office manager, my wife was
instructed to "Dispose of the old equipment".
We now had 2 Compaq
Proliant 400MHz servers and one 24 port dual speed switch. The console
model server would go to MCA and the rack mount server would go to the
church. Now, we could set up a small network and do lots of cool stuff.
I had been using Linux for a few years and learned that it makes a
great server OS. Linux is an open source OS. Briefly, that means that
the OS and the source code is available free for the download. There
are also commercial versions available with tech support, but I stuck
with the free stuff for obvious reasons. Read about open source
software
here.
There are quite a few flavors (distributions) of Linux available. I
chose RedHat 9.0 because I was familiar with it.