How many school network configurations include a reserve 'logon' and curriculum file-serving capability? For example, such a capability might comprise a reserve PC that's normally held off-line ready to be deployed when a school's principal server suffer a catastrophic crash ...note my use of the word 'when' here, rather than 'if'! An alternative configuration might comprise a pre-configured server OS on a hard-disk that can easily be installed in one of the school's faster curriculum workstations. This would at least provide a logon and a restricted file-serving capability, in case resurrecting a downed server proves far more problematic than at first anticipated. The reason I ask is because at the two schools where I did my teaching practice both suffered major problems with their principal curriculum servers. In both cases a subsequent server crash brought down the entire school-wide network for a continuous period in excess of four whole weeks!!! These problems were compounded by the fact all 200 plus PCs at each school were configured to be completely inoperable unless the user first 'logged on' to the school network. Furthermore both these schools experienced such difficulty restoring previously backed-up data, most students lost all of their coursework including work that was awaiting assessment. At one school they eventually narrowed their server problem down to mismatched dual Pentium processors installed on the motherboard compounded by an intermittently faulty SCSI cable that served to repeatedly scramble the data held on the Raid-5 disk array. At the other school they had previously suffered some apparently minor data corruptions (from their users point-of-view) that prevented their tape backup system from completing a full backup. And then a few months later the server crashed! Is the truly catastrophic scale of these disasters typical of your experience within other UK schools? ...and surely this represents an ideal opportunity to get Linux into schools, initially in the form of a low-cost (no additional server licences need be purchased) reserve 'login', 'data' and 'Internet access' server capability. David Bowles TeacherLab / Education-Support