Hi Everyone, This setup seems very similar to something I saw done in the student computer centers at UC Berkeley recently. The situation there is that they had a whole bunch of pretty nice machines running Windows and MacOS. They wanted to make Linux available too, but didn't want to dedicate machines to Linux, as Windows is still more popular. The solution developed by my friend Shane (message from him pasted below) was to make a boot floppy that people that wanted to run Linux could use. This way, he didn't have to fiddle with the (rather complex) setup already running and working on the machines.
There are a whole number of nice features of this solution.
*One machine to administer that spits out all apps, change it once and
every machine realizes the change.
*Centralized passwords. You can use the same passwords on Linux,
Windows, and Mac clients.
*Centralized home directories. The same directory is available on all
platforms, you can use whichever you think suits the current task best.
*Students can't really mess with the system much, since none of it is
local. Even if they hack root or something, everything of interest is
exported read only from the server.
*The security danger of students bringing in their own boot disks (Tom's
Root Boot, lnx-bbc.org) is closed, because there's no local system to
hack.
And others that I am not remembering.
One last comment -- Re: high school students not learning the system --
it is my opinion (as one out of high school only a few years) that the
kids in high school are *more* willing to learn this stuff than any
other sample population that would be using a computer center. They
have the most time to play around. They do not have nearly so much of a
"this is all I want to do just let me do it dammit" attitude, like I saw
in the college CCs and I imagine is probably present in most businesses.
They are also in a period of intense exploration of life interests, and
so on. So Goferit! If you're really worried, impliment a solution like
Shane's where both alternatives are available.
-ben
On to his description of what you need:
----- Forwarded message from Shane Liebling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -----
Date: Sun, 23 Sep 2001 20:05:27 -0700
From: Shane Liebling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Ben Hartshorne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: Setting up a bunch of boxen at a small school.
Well if he is talking about Linux boxes I suggest doing it with Debian and
using the "diskless" package and the "etherboot" project. That is what I did
for rescomp (though I don't know how it is going with it these days).
Basicaly you have a single server (or two if you want to split home
directories and the applications onto two seperate machines) and you network
boot all your clients from a floppy. They get a kernal from the network, boot
and nfs-root mount the / and other directories and run everything on the RAM
and hardware of the client machines.
The other option is that if the clients are all junky machines (486's, PI's,
etc) he may want to go with the x-terminals setup (have him look at the K-12
Linux site) whew you have a files server and an application server (which has
to be _BEEFY_). The clients are just dumb terminals that just run an x-server
on them (yes you could even do it all off a floppy I think with a kernal and
an x-server on it), displaying the programs that are running off the
application server.
It just depends on the hardware situation. If they have good client machines
and okay server machines go with the former, if they have junky client
machines and some spare cash to build a _BEEFY_ server, got with the latter.
-Shane
On Sunday 23 September 2001 08:50 pm, oivvio polite wrote:
> I might soon have to set up some 20 - 30 boxes supporting some 200
> students. They'll want to do word processing, browse the web, read mail.
>
> Of course any user should be able to log into his/her account from any box.
> What are my options here? Have all applications run from a powerful server
> and use boxen as X-terminals, run applications on boxen and store only home
> dirs on server...
>
> I'm looking for a setup that's easy to admin remotely and involves zero
> fiddling with the individual boxen.
>
> All ideas are interesting but some ideas (that have actually been
> implemented and proven to work on a day-to-day basis) are more interesting.
>
--
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Ben Hartshorne ...Discarding smoothly, as we disembark,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] All thoughts that held us wiser for a moment
ben.hartshorne.net Up there, alone, in the impartial dark. -M. Oliver
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