Do I have time for this?

It appears that Dublin city council have caved in to pressures from the telecommunications industry, and backed down from their plan to have free WiFi throughout the city.

The quoted reason is essentially that the plan would be contrary to EU law on state aid, which on the face of it seems plausible. Just in case you fail to believe them, the fall back position is the usual "it wouldn't be financially viable".

The council, according to various news sources, is to press ahead with plans to provide free broadband to disadvantaged areas presumably on the grounds that the telcos don't have a fleet of armoured personnel carriers available and/or pre-pay broadband is not a product they intend to offer in parts of the city which are home to a population with a propensity for random violence and wearing pyjamas to the shops at three thirty in the afternoon.

So a plan which apparently wasn't economically feasible over the whole city will now be restricted to a few economically disadvantaged areas. Riiiiight.

For a country with an appallingly poor record on broadband take-up, and some of the highest prices in Europe for some of the lowest speeds, this is warning Ireland cannot afford to ignore. The Telco's have demonstrated time and again their ability to protect their own selfish interests at the expense of the greater good. We've known this in the IT Community for well over a decade, but we've collectively failed to convince the powers that be - both at national Government & at EU level - to do enough to redress the balance. Pity that.

A crisis call comes in from on high to inform me that we'll have four people in a porta-cabin on a client site and they'll need access to their e-mail, Internet & need the ability to share files - Oh and sorry about the short notice but could you sort it out before close of business tomorrow?

A rummage in the basement junkyard of Bitsmith towers turns up a retired Dell Poweredge 2650 which appears to be in perfect working order. Lacking a spare licensed copy of any flavour of Windows Server, and needing to get the box live in short order, I used SME Server 7.2 from Contribs.org which I'd downloaded but never really got around to playing with. Current build is 7.3 from: http://wiki.contribs.org/SME_Server:Download

With the absolute minimum of fuss & bother I had an NT4 style PDC up and running in less than an hour. Granted, I'd have needed more time if I'd had to do a more complex config, but given that all I need is essentially a glorified NAS box in the least possible time, this Linux distro is perfect.

Intrigued, I took an old Dell Optiplex GX240 from the same hideout as the Poweredge and ferreted out a pair of identical Maxtor 40Gb IDE disks of similar vintage.

Booting from the SME Server CD and had a test-rig live in less time than it takes to read the FAQ. Even the paltry 256 Mb of RAM in the Optiplex didn't seem to impede it. Shutdown, swap the CD-ROM drive for the spare disk and when you reboot it'll mirror the disks.

Use a pair of 500Gb drives, and you'll have a disk-mirrored NAS box for next to nothing.

To me this is what a proper Linux box should be... Simple, fast, does what it says on the tin. Better still, contribs.org seems almost completely devoid of the holier-than-thou attitude that appears to infect a significant (but shrinking) proportion of the Linux community.

It has been said that Linux is only free if your time is of no value, and that's largely been my experience of it in the past. SME Server has changed that perception and given a new lease of life to a junkyard dog, and for that - above all - I highly recommend it.