The Maesydderwen School in the Welsh Powys County Council in the United Kingdom uses open source to run most of its servers. Sirius, the IT firm that supplied the school's software and services, reported last week that school wants to increase its use of free and open source.

The school now uses twelve servers, nine of which are running Debian GNU/Linux, a distribution of free and open source software packages. These nine Linux machines have reduced the schools' dependency on proprietary server operating systems. "This obviously resulted in savings, for now there are fewer licence fees", says Sirius spokeswoman Maz Khan.

Financial details, for example on the exit costs from the proprietary servers, are not yet available.

Of the nine open source servers, five are virtual machines. To create and manage these virtual machines, Sirius is using KVM and Libvirt. The school uses the open source tools Rsync and Rsnapshot to provide and manage backups.

Plenty of open source
Accessing files and printing services are managed using Samba, a suite of tools providing interoperability with an ubiquitous proprietary desktop system. Pupils, teachers and school staff access the systems and servers using single sign-on, provided by the open source solution Shibboleth. The school also uses the open source e-Learning tool Moodle.

For managing requests to the IT help desk, the school uses the open source issue tracking system RT. Keeping tabs on what hardware is used at the school, is done with open source solutions GLPI and FusionInventory. The Maesydderwen School employs Zabbix for monitoring the security of the systems.

Ysgol Maesydderwen describes itself as "a small and inclusive school where pupils of all abilities are encouraged to succeed in a caring, orderly and supportive environment."

More information:
Case description by Sirius
Sirius Press release
Ysgol Maesydderwen