The servers were all either Win2k workstations set up to run as "servers" or old 200MHz servers running Netware 4.11 with Groupwise.
They had no money to upgrade and the infrastructure was in really bad shape. I took some of the better workstations, loaded them up with salvaged RAM and hard drives and installed CentOS on them. All the servers did was file sharing (via samba) and DHCP. The schools web hosting ISP provided free POP/IMAP accounts so we got off Groupwise and used Thunderbird for their email. The whole setup was very very simple and when I quit, I left very detailed and simple to follow instructions on how to manage and maintain things.
Within a year they called me absolutely desperate because they were having issues (from what it sounded like, possible hardware issues, and some permission issues with samba). I pointed them to various resources where they could get help but in the end they paid some consultant to come in and replace everything with a Windows server running Exchange because they simply could not find anyone to help them with their Linux issues for the prices that they could afford.
