The core City Repair Project volunteers spend much of their time dealing with and managing information. Our main yearly event, the Village Building Convergence1, constitutes of over 100 volunteers and 200 participants and requires coordinating of materials and information flow between several partner organizations and communities. In addition we are often writing grant proposals and asking for donations and need a method to track all this information. Our volunteers also sometimes deal with large graphic images and PDF files when working on reports and other publicity and outreach materials and in trying to keep a photographic archive of our projects.

All this work is currently accomplished on two old systems with 600MHz Pentium III CPUs, 128MB of RAM, and 10GB hard drives. These systems do not meet the requirements of our day-day operations and are in desperate need of being upgraded with more modern equipment. The current systems also do not provide a facility for burning or backing up data for off-site storage or transfer, putting us in danger of losing organizational data and history in case of a system crash.

Because of running on older hardware, we are suffering from a lack of proper data retention due to the fact that the current machines cannot handle very large files and have limited storage space. Our volunteers often take City Repair data files home to perform work on their faster systems and we end up with data scattered among several computers and in some cases have lost track of data due to a volunteer leaving the organization and the data not being retained locally. We will solve this problem by deploying an open source cross-platform VPN solution such as OpenVPN.

Much of the data we interact with with is currently stored in various spreadsheets and text documents and we would like to move this into a relational database to increase the efficiency of the organization. Once this is done, we can provide interfaces into this data via an LDAP server for contact management, automated report generation for fund raising and grant writing purposes, automated mail merges for outreach and publicity needs, and automatic web content generation.

Given the above requirements, we will be upgrading two existing desktop machines along with adding a centralized file, data, print, and VPN server.

This document outlines the steps that will be taken to migrate from the existing network infrastructure to the new configuration.

The first step of this process is the installation of a central file, print, login, and data server. Once the server is installed, technology volunteers will work with individuals to transfer data from their workstations to the central server. The data on the server will be backed up on a regular basis and backups will be stored in a yet to be determined off-site location. (Question: Does City Repair have a safe deposit box with our bank?).

Time Frame: 2 weeks to setup server and migrate data.

The next step in this transition process will be replacing two of the machines in the office with updated systems that include DVD burners, faster CPUs, more memory, and larger hard drives. The systems will being donated by Intel Corporation and will include licensed installations of Windows XP Professional. Before the existing machines are replaced, technology volunteers will work with individuals to determine their what software is installed on the existing systems and needs to be installed on the new systems. In addition to specific packages that need to be migrated from the existing systems, the following applications will be installed on all systems:

• AdAware
• Adobe Acrobat
• Open Office 2.0
• Mozilla Firefox with standard plugins (Flash, Shockwave, etc)
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• The Gimp (Open source image editor)
• GAIM (Open source instant messenger with support for all major networks - Yahoo messenger, MSN, AIM)

For security reasons, individual users will not be given administrator access and thus will not be able to install software on the system. If an individual needs a certain piece of software installed, they should make a request to the technology working group.

Time Frame: 2 weeks

After the data migration is completed and new machines are installed, the server and workstations will be configured such that a volunteer will be able to login into the City Repair office network using any office system or their personal laptop. This will require creating new logins for volunteers. Volunteers will be assigned logins using a FirstInitialLastName naming convention. For example, Deepak Saxena’s login will be dsaxena and Ryan Matson will be rmatson. This is different than our regular email login due to the fact that we might have multiple users with the same first name (ex: Ryan Curren and Ryan Matson).

In addition to individual logins, the server will be configured with shared folders that can be accessed only by certain groups of users. For example, the finance information will only be accessible by Melinda, Kimo, and anyone that must have access to the financial data. Before these accounts can be created, the technology group needs to know the names of all the volunteers that need access to the City Repair systems and what functional groups they belong to.

CityRepair volunteers who want to access CR network and data resources using a personal laptop in the office should let the technology group know that this is the case and we will configure their systems appropriately.

Time Frame: 4 weeks

In addition to allowing personal laptops to access data while at CRHQ, the technology group will work with individuals who want remote access to CR data while at home, at a coffee shop, or on the road. The purpose of doing this is to ensure that we do not end up with CR data scattered across volunteer’s personal systems but instead keep it at a central location. Furthermore, this will allow for remote access to useful information such as the volunteer database, photos, etc.

Time Frame: 2 weeks to configure remote access on the server and one day per individual.