UH2@psuvm.psu.edu (Lee Sailer) (02/08/90)
I'd like to describe an environement, and see if people will offer advice on good (not best 8-) ways to proceed. Small college with about 120 faculty and 2500 undergrads. Mainframe tied to Bitnet. Several smaller machines on campus not connected to anything. 20 SGI's on an ethernet, Ultrix on a VAX in a prof's office (one phone, no net), 3 other misc. unix boxes in profs' office (each with one phone, no net), 20 msdos machines on ethernet with VAX VMS fileserver. I'd like to get these machines hooked to the nets for email, and then news. (Only some need news, I guess.) My current thinking is to get a second phone for the Ultrix mVax or one of the SGI's, and then let the other machines use it as a hub. We think we can get a feed for that machine from one of the bigger Unix machines at University Park. (Penn State Erie is connected by leased phone lines.) Questions: Should I stick to the native mail software on the machines we've got, or would it be better in the long run to switch to something like elm? We are low on system administrator expertise. (No grad students, no smiley ;-} What are the current choice for news software? This would probably only go on the main hub, so that it could be fed to others in the Erie area. None of these machines can FTP, so it would wither have to come in by mail or tape/cartridge. If it is OK, could we discuss this here? Otherwise, use email. Thanks.