Something interesting happened yesterday. One of the professors in my department reached out to me because he had heard of my #IT experience. He wants to build a secure network exclusively for social workers to communicate. This is exciting because he has applied for a grant to make this happen. There is concern within the community about eavesdropping by government on sensitive private data.
I’ve a couple of ideas to approach this. VPN links to POPs in major cities. Then direct transit links between the POPs. The network needs to support voice, video, and email, as well as some web communication platforms. But the emphasis is on this being a completely closed system. No traffic should go out to the regular internet.
This project will give me something to do this summer. That’s when the grant is expected to come through and it will pay a small stipend and cover any travel expenses that might come up. What’s cool is that my prof likes my ideas to go open source with Fedora Linux on the client side and a mix of BSD and Alma Linux on the server side.
We even got a local data center that donated a rack and heavily discounted service for the project. This should be a lot of fun. Also, it should be rather fast and efficient. Each social worker will be given a dedicated, locked down laptop solely for accessing the secure network.