Re: Servers as appliances

[Ray Olszewski <ray@comarre.com>]

I've come into this discussion a bit late (saw your posting on the riverdale
list, but only just joined seul), so apologies in advance if I'm going over
old ground.

I like the basic idea, and I'd be happy to participate in a group that
develops something like what you originally described. I did spend 3 years
as a network manager at a small (300 student) school, but I've been away
from computers in education for 3 years now. For the moment, a few thoughts:

1. Do you need a full distribution, or would a set of custom installation
scripts tied to one of the major distributions be sufficient? The few things
I can think of that the main distros don't include -- ssl is the first that
comes to mind -- would have to be unavailable in a schools distribution
also, for license and US-export-law reasons (at least if the project
included US-based participants).

2. Is the Oracle tie-in consistent with the observation that the system
would have to support mainly Mac and PC clients? I looked at the Oracle
site, and the program seemed very geared to Oracle's specific view of
Network Computing. Or is the Oracle site out of date, at least in its emphasis?

3. Have you looked at the setup systems used by products like the Cobalt
Qube? I've only read reviews of the product, not seen it in action, but the
reviews make it sound like there's a lot to be learned about simplifying
setup from a system like this. (Is any of their stuff GPL'd? I can't find
any materials available for downloading at their Web site.)

4. Your comments about diskless workstations are interesting, but I see that
as, at best, a long-range goal. The more immediate one should be, as you've
also suggested, supporting existing WinXX and Mac clients in schools.

5. It seems to me that a successful project will balance flexibility and
constraint. Identifying the core tasks that a *small* school LAN and
Internet domain needs, then configuring a server to provide them, is a
manageable task. These are the sites that most need simplified setup ...
larger, complicated sites will need expertise anyway, and that will include
the ability to handle extensive customization. For example, in looking over
the breakout below, I think a system can be very useful to schools without
accommodating anything nearly so complex, for two reasons:

        a. Any school with this many servers will need a trained person to
be running the network. It seems to me that your target is smaller
installations, the ones where some teacher is asked to get things running in
his or her "spare time". 

        b. Even for large sites (at least large as schools go), the 9-way
breakout seems unrealistic. Why separate firewall, web proxy, and IP Masq
machines, for example? How often will a school have enough dhcp traffic to
justify a separate server for it? Why separate file and print servers? I
doubt a division into more than 3 or 4 hosts would be wise, except perhaps
for the very largest installations (and even then I would expect to see
departmentalization, not this level of separation by service).

6. A lot of complexity gets added to install packages when they need to
support oddball hardware. Would schools be well served by a package that
restricted itself to reasonably up-to-date and common hardware, or is
support for everything that might be in a server important to this market?

In any case, please do let me know if a group comes together to work on this
project.

At 06:42 AM 5/23/99 -0700, Tonnesen Steve wrote [in part]:
>On Sat, 22 May 1999, Michael A Hamblin wrote:
>
>> The biggest problem I see is for a medium to large sized school, services
>> will have to be broke up onto other machines to handle the load. For
>> instance a machine for each of these basic serving operations:
>> 
>> Authentication server
>> bootp/dchp server
>> Web server
>> NFS/SAMBA
>> IMAP/POP and SMTP
>> Print server
>> Firewall
>> Web proxy/cache/filter
>> IP Masqerader (when there aren't many free IPs)
>
>9 servers in one school?  I must be dreaming.  Most I have is 3 for a
>school of a little over 1000 students.


------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski                                        -- Han Solo
762 Garland Drive
Palo Alto, CA  94303-3603
650.328.4219 voice     			        ray@comarre.com        
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