Preface

In many Open Source Software (OSS) projects, documentation often fails to get the attention it deserves. Writing documentation is a low priority task on the to-do list of many software developers. They like to write exciting code, come up with cleverly devised algorithms, or try to break the unbreakable. That's all very fine, but we think it's also a pity. Many good OSS projects could have had a much broader user base if more care had been taken to properly document the project.

There are a lot of good (or bad if you wish) reasons for this lack of project documentation:

On the other hand, there is one very good reason why documentation should be written: RTFM is Internet jargon and stands for 'Read The F****** Manual'. The abbreviation certainly shows what many developers tend to think of manuals in general. Others in the Internet community maintain that the full expression is 'Read The Fine Manual'. Whatever the case, we certainly hope that the readers of this installation guide, when installing their ServerAtSchool server, will come to regard the latter version as correct.

One of the reasons for our writing this guide the way we did is our target audience, who will be wanting a step-by-step guide. Another reason is that we prefer not to have our work interrupted and precious time wasted by people asking questions when the answers can be found in this guide. We did our very best to make this installation guide as complete as possible. Please read Appendix C. How the ServerAtSchool documentation was written, which describes in detail the procedures that we used to produce this guide.

This guide has a companion manual, the ServerAtSchool User Manual, which is intended for the local systems administrator, the ICT coordinator, teachers, pupils, and other end users. It documents the complete procedure for setting up workstations with educational software in a school environment, the day to day system administration tasks, and also contains basic instructions for end users to get started, such as how to log on to the network and how to use webmail.

We hope you will enjoy your own server at school for years to come.

Peter Fokker, Bussum, the Netherlands <peter (at) berestijn (dot) nl>
Dirk Schouten, Amsterdam, the Netherlands <schoutdi (at) knoware (dot) nl>

March 2006

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Authors: Peter Fokker <peter (at) berestijn.nl> and Dirk Schouten <schoutdi (at) knoware.nl>
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