Department of Computer and Engineering, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, India

We at Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, have a 32 node cluster for the Hadoop MapReduce Framework running on Debian. All our servers in Data Center including our web server, LDAP server, mail server, database server, firewall, proxy server and DNS servers run on Debian. Debian is so widely used in our college that we have a separate intranet repository containing disc images and packages for various versions of Debian. We are also actively migrating Windows and Macintosh based machines to run Debian. We found Debian to be much more stable and secure.

Practical sessions and laboratories on C Programming, System Software and Network Programming are conducted with the help of Debian machines. Users can logon to their accounts from any machine in college and use samba based shares provided to them. Demo stalls on Debian are organized on Software Freedom day every year. This has encouraged students to use Debian when working on their projects.

The number of client workstations that houses Debian would be around 110 in the Central Computing Center and another 100 computers in various labs in Computer Science Department.

Debian has enabled us to automate several System Administration tasks. Several cron jobs and shell scripts are currently being used. iptables is very useful in Network Management activities.