First post - hope it's in the right place - if not please redirect me!
I'm planning on building a custom Porteus USB stick, and would like some help and advice.
Background / Scenario:
As a small local council we required to provide IT support to our local branch of the "Civil Defence" who require laptops and an internet connection in emergency events, eg Earthquakes.
To date, this has meant having a big yellow box full of windows laptops, loaded with browsers and MS-Office 365 / Teams. (The fact that this solution also relies on an internet connection that can not be guaranteed is another issue - more on that later). This is a very inefficient system as the machines depreciate in value just sitting there, are slow to boot as they immediately require large updates and fixes to be applied. (Yes I know a routine of weekly checks would help).
Proposal
I'm thinking of building a custom Porteus USB stick, loaded with the relevant modules to provide a fast & consistent software front end. My logic is that staff can use their "Business As Usual" laptops (which are generally more powerful) booted with Porteus in emergency situations. This also means that we don't have moeny tied up in laptops that depreciate in a box. I am also not convinced we could use out in-situ LAN, wifi and broadband connection, so our solution needs to be "portable". I'm thinking if we have to decamp to literally a camp, I want a wifi access point servicing the portues clients and using a satellite uplink to the internet. This leads to the thought that a "local" fileserver would be required. Oh the fun.
Help please
I would like some help getting a Porteus image setup that:
- Boots to a menu/wizard prompting connection to WIFI
- Rename hostname of booted machine so their are no networking issues
- On successful connection, client machine checks for a "server" on local LAN.
- If server found, mount a share on the server.
- If server not found, prompt Prompt "Will this machine be the server"?
- Configure Samba to share a local folder to the other porteus clients.
- Somewhere give the option to install to HD..."Do you want to install to HD?
Modules and configuration need to include:
- Chrome Web-browser with pre-populated bookmarks
- eMail client
- Word Processor
- Spreadsheet
I am at the early stages on this, and will no doubt move my own goalposts, but any advice and help would be very much appreciated.
Regards,
Richard.
