[luau] A Mission For Luau

[Brian Chee]

Ok...I get back from networld+interop on the 10th....I'll die for a little while (20 hour days for setup) and then I'll start the ball rolling with my fellow sysadmins on getting "disposal" equipment.....

I'll also start pinging my friends in silicon gulch about donations of largish switches that would be suitable for clusters and hub/switches of other varieties for small labs, etc....

My kids and I also (when we have time) have dropped in fiber backbones for k-12 schools in the past.  This type of thing saves MUCH money and gives lots of future for schools....I tend to prioritize for the "have nots" first....but I do REQUIRE that the PTA provide labor to do things like digging ditches and tacking the fiber up between buildings, etc....no free lunch, and our labor is after hours only....this has been a BIG problem in the past with schools insisting that work be done during the regular work week.  So thusly we've turned down quite a few schools as being unreasonable.

We're finishing up Lyon's arboretum first....then another project is possible....

/brian chee

University of Hawaii ICS Dept
Advanced Network Computing Lab
1680 East West Road, POST rm 311
Honolulu, HI  96822
808-956-5797 voice, 808-956-5175 fax

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: R. Scott Belford 
  To: luau at videl.ics.hawaii.edu 
  Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2002 6:46 PM
  Subject: Re: [luau] A Mission For Luau


  Brian,

  Well Done! I am at the plate and swinging. I need team mates. I live in Kailua. I have a large Garage. I have an employer with a large warehouse who could help. We just couldn't do any work there. We could in my Garage. Let's try to build on the excellent work you have already done. You are in an especially good position to capture the "trash" at UH.

  scott


  On Thursday, April 25, 2002, at 03:26 PM, Brian Chee wrote:


    You've hit on something that many different organizations have tried to do in the past....here's what we were doing....
     
    I HAD a warehouse are to store stuff while a small crew of students restored/scavenged to make some good machines....they were then put into K-12 libraries as netware catalog stations...worked fine as dos workstations....we also did some machines with telnet/web/etc on them with old windows and those also worked fine....
     
    then uh took away my storage area and thusly the program died....
     
    The rules that we have to work under are:
    - wait forever for the property management folks to allow us to dispose of the computers on inventory.
    - give the ITS organization first dibs
    - store the stuff as long as it takes, but now no storage
    - finally give really old stuff away
     
    We are now disposing of P120's and P200's which are mightly fine linux terminals....sooooo if someone else has the energy to work with me on this kind of stuff...I'll extend feelers out out again for people doing disposals of low end pentium class machines....
     
    So....am I to understand you're stepping up to the plate?
     
    /brian chee
     
    University of Hawaii ICS Dept
    Advanced Network Computing Lab
    1680 East West Road, POST rm 311
    Honolulu, HI  96822
    808-956-5797 voice, 808-956-5175 fax

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: R. Scott Belford
    To: luau at videl.ics.hawaii.edu
    Sent: Thursday, April 25, 2002 6:09 PM
    Subject: [luau] A Mission For Luau

    Several weeks ago I spoke with Jon Fujiwara at the University of Hawaii's College of Business about taking all the computers they trash and doing something with them. The idea came from observing this heap of hardware that sat under a staircase for weeks while everything good was pilfered. Eventually it was all trashed. I am convinced that a lot of that could have been used. Jon tells me that the few charities who accept hardware only want stuff "fast" enough to run windows. This leaves a lot of "trash". Charles described to me another pile of pc's outside of UH's Physics department. I think that if we want to positively influence the community's impression of Linux/*bsd, the conversion of old PC's for the poor and disenfranchised (of which we have much in Hawaii) should become our mission. It would create great press for linux in general, and it would generate networking opportunities for you guys who want it. Perhaps a non-profit company could be created to facilitate this. I have a second phone line that could be used to field interested calls. I am sure that we all have space to store some hardware; I have a large garage I can donate. You each could help hunt down "junk" from our local universities, etc.

    Every day there is good stuff going to waste here. There is a tremendous digital divide on the islands. I would imaging many of Sandi and Dustin's neighbors in the Kahaluu area could benefit. There are churches, senior citizens, etc., that are waiting for your efforts and creativity. We as the local linux community can do something about this that demonstrates our capacity to affect real social change with this open source linux thing.

    I have been waiting for when I had time to delve into this to post it to the group. The post below that I saw on Slashdot is inspiring. Here in the land of Aloha we can do something special. Let's find a way.


    http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/25/0515220&mode=flat&tid=99

    An Anonymous Coward writes "Out in Oakland, CA a group is taking donated PC's and breathing new life into them with Linux. They turn around and donate the computers to schools, build POVRAY render farms (with MOSIX) and generally promote Linux."

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