St Joseph's
College Network Project
Being an elite "band
one" school in Hong Kong, St. Joseph's College is the brewing
ground for tomorrow leaders of Hong Kong. Education is the fundamental
of the faith of the state and it people. To provide the best of
the best to educate the Hong Kong next generation, St Joseph is
constantly enhancing the capability of its teaching and supporting
staffs and as well as the delivering facilities.
Background
St. Joseph's College has a history of over 140 years. The college
was formerly known as St. Saviour's College, founded in 1860.
In 1875, six La Salle Brothers took over the school and renamed
it as St. Joseph's College, and is the first Catholic Boys' school
in Hong Kong. St. Joseph's College grew from an institution consisting
of 75 students at the beginning to the institution today, providing
education to over 4,200 kindergarten, primary and secondary students.
Challenge
In the recent advancement of Information Technology, the Government
of Hong Kong has set up the Quality Education Fund to enhance
the Information Technology facility at school. St Joseph being
the leading school in Hong Kong is among the first to implement
a full scale Information Technology infrastructure.
After equipped the
entire school with sophisticated IT infrastructure, St. Joseph
suddenly realize that it would require additional resources to
support the IT infrastructure. Furthermore, St Joseph would needed
professional advice to get the most out of the investment.
Solution
St Joseph has seek professional advice from Alfacom Solutions
to lessen the burden on maintaining the IT infrastructure. Together
with St Joseph, we have determined that St Joseph would need to
streamline it user management since students come and go every
year. In addition, the IT infrastructure need to protected from
the unwanted attention from the Internet. Last but not least,
with thousand of users, the network usage must be optimized to
accompany the huge volume of traffic.
The opensource Linux
Redhat platform is chosen to be the base of the solution for it
robustness and flexibility. To manage the users, both on Windows
and Redhat, with ease, a cauterized user management interface
has been created. To prevent the system from unauthorized access
from the Internet, a three-zones firewall has been in place between
the Internet and Intranet. To have the infrastructure serves it
users better, two proxy servers have be installed for faster and
smoother Internet access. In addition, two email servers, one
for staffs and one for students, have been installed.
Why partner with Alfacom Solutions
With the know-how in the Information Technology and long reputation
on successful project delivery, St Joseph has chosen Alfacom Solutions
as a partner among other vendors.
System
Benefits
After the system been implemented, St Joseph has reduced the redundancy
work on management user on difference system. In additional, it
saved cost to host it own DNS server. The staffs and students
are especially pleased with the web-based email servers that enable
communication between them. The Internet access response time
is also dramatically reduced since the system been put in place.
Key
Components
Service element
* Firewall
* Proxy
* Email Server
* DNS
