[ale] Partially OT: moving apps from old to new PC's(non-Linux)

[Jonathan Glass IBB]

On Wed, 2004-03-31 at 20:54, Brian Chase wrote:
> griffisb at bellsouth.net wrote:
> >  
> > 
> >> 
> >>From: Geoffrey <esoteric at 3times25.net> 
> >> 
> >>I've got to say, this is a perfect opportunity to move them to Linux.  
> >>Save them money, and have more robust systems. 
> >> 
> >>Don't tell me they can't learn it, my 60+ mother-in-law is on SuSE 9.0  
> >>right now and has been on Linux for a couple of years now. 
> >> 
> >>Email and browser at first.  Most recently using OpenOffice to maintain  
> >>the family reunion address book. 
> >> 
> > 
> >  
> > It would be good. My main concern is that the Parish records are in a Paradox 
> > database (old stuff, it loads under DOS on the server). I'd hate to tackle that 
> > project. But, since there should be a few "spare" PC's after all data is 
> > transferred and tested, it would be a good idea to set up at least one Linux 
> > PC. 
> >  
> 
> The Paradox database might not be as painful as you think.  I'm sure 
> Paradox has some sort of flat-file export, CSV, tab-delimited, etc. 
> Might import into PostgreSQL or MySQL with a little bit of tweaking.
> 
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Take it one step further.  Load up Linux + VMware on the primary server
(PDC, fileserver, whatever) and run the DOS app in a VMWare instance. 
Good way to reuse hardware, and keep it secure.  The cool thing is
you'll be able to restrict access to the app via IPTABLES, and back it
up via native linux utils.  ;)

Jonathan