Re: EDU Win Lab

[Harry McGregor <micros@azstarnet.com>]

I am using StarOffice in an elementary school Linux lab (site license =
$295! not bad).  In fact we were the first school in the US to order a
site licence (Corbett Elementary School, In Tucson AZ, USA).  We did
find that 32MB of ram was rather painful, but 64MB is doing grate.

This summer I am reabuilding the lab (software wise, we originaly built
the lab over the winter break, I need to redo/polish the software
though).  Here is a short list of what I intend to impliment.

New NFS server (NFS v3 support, via kernel mode NFS, the normal
implimentation on linux is VERY slow).

Full SNMP monitoring of each stations bandwidth usage (every system I
can impliment on, including macs, If I can do it).  MRTG graphing.

KMuser for user administration

Install of Star Office for each student user (currently we are kludging
it via every one loging in with the user "Student", but this creates
issues with the NFS mounted /home.  Doing this will take about 2.1GB of
space on the server (3MB per user).

KDE 1.1 (with Slackware linux 4.0)

Killistrator

many more education/semi educational games (students use the lab during
lunch for recreation/exploration).

Router/Firewall, to force use of the district proxy server (the router
is IPchains based, unfortuatly we don't have rights on the schools Cisco 
router (another department in the district no less), so we are adding
our own firewall.


IP Masq router (with bridging support for IPX), for one hall of the
school.  We have run out of IP addresses (1/2 class C space, the
district was lucky enough to get a class B, but the district has 102
schools, and Info tech (admin side) gets 1/2 of each class C, and the
high schools needed more orignialy, this is f*cked up, since the admin
use is only 5-25 systems per school...).  This will have an effect on
the district loggin of the proxy server (30 systems will be on one ip),
but is neccessary to deal with all of the donated systems.


I need to get DOS/Win3.x on the lab systems to support some legacy
software (mostly for K,1,2, the school is K-5)

possible implimetation of Mozilla, though it is not quite ready at it's
current state.





If anyone has recomendations on howto LOCKDOWN KDE, please let me know.  
Most of the general linux security will work, but I need to get it so
the student's can't f*ckup their own desktop settings, etc.


The lab has been doing well.  We started with 30 donated P90s, put about
$2000 into soundcards, networking cables, hubs, heatsink/fans, etc.  We
have just ordered about $7000 worth of stuff on this next years budget
(the 2K was PTA funds), including an LP225 projector, an HP 4000N printer,
and 17 17" monitors (doing about half the lab, will try to scrape the
funds up to get the rest of the lab to 17" monitors.  We have also ordered
9 UPS (500va), one for the few servers, and then one for every 4
workstations.  I want to try and avoid ext2 corruption, considering these
things are taken down and started up every day, we have enough stress on
the system, I don't want 5 sec power outages to kill them.

			Harry

On Sun, 9 May
1999, Hilaire Fernandes wrote:

> > Productivity Software (connecting to linux):
> >         Word processors:  maxwell, Abisource, koffice, gnome, star office, word star
> 
> We should only tell about the one the kids can use without repeated
> crash. I don't think anyone there wants to receive comment from student
> who loose data because of a crash
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Hilaire Fernandes 
> Dr Geo project http://www.drgeo.seul.org
>