Please (Pretty Please!) change the 'subject' when changing, well, the subject.

Thousand appologies - I am always winging about this on my own lists - and here I am, doing the same !

The technical idea is sound, the support, development and maintenance model have to keep with the OSS approach.

That is the key. The problem with this whole area, is that I don't see how it can work from a central body, commercially. If you have people that can do the work (ie a technician/IT person) in school - then you could create a whole internet lab from them.

An estimate stated that there were around 250,000 unwanted 486s in warehouses in the UK, that's half a landfill site.

This is exactly the sort of thing that got me into this area in the first place. I have 10 of those in my spare room ! I would really like to do this with some of my 10 at my daughters school, but there are a number of fundamental problems that stand in my way : 1. I cannot support it full time (I have another job :-) 2. They would need to buy a single top-spec machine as a server (and all their money/machines are tied up) 3. They would be doing things on their own, as all their central IT support is Windows based. I am not sure how the OSS model, of sending stuff around the world electronically could relate to hardware though :-) We could perhaps take the view that a series of single distributions could be developed to do a single thing - and that thing only. This could be used to turn a single machine into an internet 'appliance' with minimal fuss. I have seen reviews of 'network-area-storage' devices, 'internet ready' cameras, 'web-server-in-a-box' devices, all based on Linux, with admin via the web. I would be interested in adding to the smoothwall idea. Kevin.