Expert shares secrets to saving thousands with K12LTSP (Linux.com)

Posted Feb 5, 2007 3:49 UTC (Mon) by horen (subscriber, #2514) [Link]

Bravo! An excellent, clearly-written, and thought-provoking article. I spent the 2005/6 school year administering a 400-host MacOS9 and OSX network at an exclusive (read: unnecessarily expensive) private school, and with my 18 years of Unix/Linux sysadmin experience, I often wished that they had spent the money building a K12LTSP system. I have several observations:

1. Parents and school administrators are easily flummoxed by Media Technology Consultants who pimp the latest-and-greatest hardware, especially laptops. There's nothing easier than spending Other People's Money, and it's usually spent on "bling", rather than substance. If parents want their kids to have a $4,000 computer, which will more often than not be used for game playing, let 'em buy it for home use, not for school.
2. With the exception of elementary/primary/lower-school students, who received great benefit from (sadly) for-pay, browser-based software, such as Learning Today, the lion's share of student computer use was devoted to myspace.com, nfl.com, nba.com, mlb.com, fashion-oriented websites, cars, etc., etc. Even where students took advantage of the school's Internet connection, it was primarily to use Google or other search engine to focus-in, laserlike, on a single piece of information; rarely did they ever bother reading the paragraph in which that piece of information was found, or surrounding paragraphs, or [gasp!] the entire article. Information without context is worse than useless.
3. Apple's Remote Desktop gave us (a two-man team) the ability to not only monitor how the school's computing resources were used, but more important, to show students (and teachers) how to perform tasks which were either difficult, or used infrequently; I was glad to read that FL_TeacherTool is included in K12LTSP.
4. The Broadcast and Distribution functions of FL_TeacherTool were (in their MacOSX incarnations) invaluable aids to teacher and student, alike. FL_TeacherTool could be made that much more powerful, if it included an easily-used GUI-based facility for students to turn-in assignments from either the campus network, or via email from home. An added use of Distribution could be sending regular software-generated reports about student progress and/or problems to the students' parents, using email.
5. Foolishly, my employer purchased the Microsoft Office program suite, rather than using the Appleworks program suite, which parallels MS Office and comes bundled with Apple educational purchases (the school invested in eMacs). Students need to know A word-processing program, A spreadsheet, and A presentation-graphics program; which ones they should learn is, for the student, immaterial; but for the school, can be critical.
6. Capacity planning! Your servers can never have too-much RAID5 disk space, and the author's suggestion about RAID1 is a "must have" for your servers' system disks. If there's available funding, think seriously about using fiber-channel disks for the user-accounts RAID5 unit, together with a low-end (used) Brocade (or similar) switch, and use load-balancing to "grow" your server farm when/if use requires you to, without having an a priori requirement to increase the RAID5 space.
7. Networking! If you can swing it, go with Gigabit Ethernet from the start. Most of the traffic on a K-12 campus network is between the clients and the servers, so a comparatively slower Internet connection isn't going to kill anyone. However, slow server-response translates into student frustration, and for grades 6-12, frustration is another one of those "silent killers".
8. If the clients don't support LinuxBIOS, consider maxing-out the RAM and booting each client from its own LiveCD and, while you're at it, junk the clients' internal hard-drives and save power while cutting the noise level.
9. It is far easier to get large amounts of PII/PIII desktop computers donated to a school, than one would think. Many states have built-in requirements for doing business with private-sector businesses which mandate donating, rather than destroying, computer hardware that is no longer "ready for prime time." Even if only at the level of a 25-host computer lab, having standardized hardware allows sysadmins to focus on more meaningful tasks than searching for a replacement RAM module that hasn't been produced since Abba was "the rage".
10. eBay is your friend.