openhgs

Full time - holidays are for server upgrades, rearranging the network cabinet, chucking accumulated junk and enjoying the peace and quiet.

We have MACs, Linux and XP in the school; the order I've listed them in is the reverse of the hours spent supporting them, which XP taking a disproportionate amount of time, especially stall laptops. I personally find Linux the easiest to support - familiarity helps. The MAC Books never, ever go wrong - the staff love them! Both Microsoft and Apple stole their ideas from Xerox/PARC. Gates looked at the work of PARC (the Xerox Alto) and rightly decided that his DOS offering was extremely primitive in comparison, and the rest as they say is history.

Have you seen the "I'm a PC and I'm a MAC" ads? Sums the situation up perfectly. http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/

We did our upgrade today. There are numerous mistakes in the installation instructions, and we found the schedular instructions complete nonsense (we couldn't get it to work at all). Eportal is a lot slower. There were a few issues reported by the admin staff, the most common being that none of them could get into CMIS following the upgrade (the missing file name feature) - very annoying. Apart from that it's all going swimmingly.

And what do you think we did before we had Windows and games which are far to easy to obtain? We used to write our own and have great fun playing them. Nowadays, kids buy a game, download the cheats off the web and thats it, game won. We did have cheats in our games; it involved looking at the source code. Doing that enabled me to find the extra elusive point in Advent. I used to have a few EA games for the Commodore 64, and I've tried the so called cutting edge games of today. These all pale into insignificance to Lunar Lander running on a DEC GT40. Give me a light pen and I get you to the McDonalds. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/29/GT40_Lunar_Lander.jpg

We've been running it for 2 years and we are extremely happy with it. At the mo, we are running version 1.24. Since we first installed it, we've seen an 80% reduction in paper usage. We have a very strict quota policy; once you've used up your weekly allowance, that's it - no more pages until next week. Pykota is very easy to install and upgrade. Jerome Alet's support is second to none. The perfect adjunct to CUPS.

Google pointed me to this link which has their ranking http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/education/03/school_tables/secondary_schools/html/935_4038.stm I very much doubt that their ranking has anything to do with what o/s they use.

Since you mentioned it, it's Betamax - far higher tape to head speed so better picture quality. VHS won 'cus they had better sales people.

Cool, I have 13 Windows 2003 servers running all kinds of things, current uptime for all 250+ days . 372 days today for our 10 Linux servers (LTSP). Has to be Linux for numerous reasons : * no viruses, spyware, etc (= lower TCO) * freewill and determinism * stability - I can't remember the last time one of our Linux boxes crashed * I'm in total control * runs out of the box and does something useful! * bloody easy to configure (what is this "registry" crap?) * don't have to reboot just because I add or remove software * does as it's told (an M$ laptop refused to load SP2 the other day, due to it running on battery power - what crap is that?), * I can run Linux on anything from my 386 laptop to Blue Gene/L - if I could afford to own it :-) * very easy to troubleshoot - nothing is hidden * not tied into the gui - who needs a gui anyway? * very closely related to Unix, which has been around forever - stuff I learned 15 years ago on Unix is still useful on Linux; most of the things that I learned about Windows 3.11 are completely inapplicable to XP/W2K etc.

Maybe try a Z39.50 search against a catalog known to be good for fiction, eg National Library of Scotland or Clive (lib.ci.clive.ia.us). The "obvious" US Library of Congress is very good for non-fiction searches.

We've been using PyKota for over a year now and it works very well, much better than the built in CUPS quota system. The built it CUPS quota can only be customised at the group level, where as PyKkota can be customised at the user level. Our experienced showed that CUPS quota counts most PDF files as 1 page, regardless of length. The author of PyKota, Jérôme Alet provides excellent support. It does exactly what it says on the tin. Our experiences are documented here http://www.openhgs.org.uk/it.cgi/PyKota

This sounds suspiciously like an issue with the hal daemon. I've found trouble shooting this little monster to be impossible. Do what I do and take the easy route. Disable the hal daemon and mount your usb drives manually. Something like mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/usb should do he trick.

or phpScheduleIt http://www.php.brickhost.com/

It looks like I've got it easy compared to everyone else : install an LTSP network - 2 servers, 30 thin clients chuck out a load of junk go on holiday and thats it!

Which is what our Linux servers are called - The LTSP servers are Lisa, Bart, Maggie, Homer, Marge, MrBurns, Selma, and Patty. Maud, Ned and Rod (with Tod to come) are a clustered file server. Otto does the backups, Apu is my development box, Skinner is the print server and ComicBookGuy is the intranet server. There are plenty more names available if we get more servers. For M$, the CMIS server is SV1 (server 1) and there isn't a server 2. The eportal box is rather imaginatively named eportal.

We run everything on the curriculum side. Our LTSP servers each handle 15 clients without blinking. I think that we could easily support 50 clients per server, each running OO. Currently we have 120 thin clients and we could easily expand this to 400 without increasing server capacity. In a typical classroom, each student will have 3 or 4 instances of Firefox open (they don't seem to know about the tab feature), a couple of OO files (document and spreadsheet), and a couple of other things Kuickshow, KAtomix, Tuxpaint, etc. So each user will have 10 or so apps running (say 30 students per class), 3 classrooms full. The servers hum along without any problems. Our only bottle neck seems to be Internet access, whicg does slow considerably when 100 people are browsing at the same time. We are not alone in needing a bigger pipe.

Yes - it tracks users and you can add them to whatever group you like, or filter at the individual user level. We use two groups, the default being strict filtering and the staff group not so strict. Bloxx filters both url and page content. The page content filter is very good. If you do a google search for "hardcore" the results are blocked, but "hardcore concrete" is OK. Similarly "sex" is blocked, but "sex education" is OK, "strippers" is blocked but "paint strippers" is OK, etc. You can tailor both filters to your sites requirements, for instance you might decide that the content filter doesn't apply to one group, but the url filter does. When we implemented it, designing the rules was a challenge. I setup very strict default filtering, and waited for the staff to say that they needed access to a site. I then setup staff groups (teachers and admin) and adjusted the filtering for groups based on the complaints. It's very quick to change a filter too. The staff can ask me to block or unblock a site and it's done immediately.

We use Bloxx. You can lockout a particular machine, or a group of machines. You can setup different filtering criteria for different times of the day. It has excellent reporting. It auto-updates every night. The Bloxx people are very helpful and quick to respond to problems. We chose an off the self solution for an easy implementation. I was going to roll out a Dansguardian box but time (as ever) was short.

Here is the important bit of ours default-lease-time 21600; max-lease-time 21600; ddns-update-style none; allow booting; allow bootp; option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0; option broadcast-address 192.168.0.255; option routers 192.168.0.8; option domain-name-servers 192.168.0.8; option domain-name "ltsp"; option root-path "192.168.0.8:/opt/ltsp/i386"; option option-128 code 128 = string; option option-129 code 129 = text; shared-network WORKSTATIONS { subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 { range dynamic-bootp 192.168.0.50 192.168.0.253; use-host-decl-names on; option log-servers 192.168.0.8;

CUPS quota is not all that reliable; experience has shown that PDF files only get counted as one page, regardless of how long the print job really is. I'd advice you look at pykota http://www.librelogiciel.com/software/PyKota/Presentation/action_Presentation It works very well and you can do quotaing at the user level if required, which we have found to be very useful.

All you need to know (and more!) is on the samba website (http://www.samba.org). Specifically have a look at http://us1.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/ I can also recommend the O'Reilly book "Using Samba"

I have option subnet-mask in my /etc/dhcpd.conf file. Did you make a change to the /etc/dhcpd.conf and forget to restart the dhcpd daemon?

What I find interesting is that most sites have 2 or more DCs (and someone said that you must have at least two). Once again, we swim against the tide - we only have one. I know that MickeySoft say that you should have more than one, to handle machine failures and load balancing. Machine failures (both hardware and software) are far less frequent now than even 5 years ago, so do we REALLY need more that one DC? Also, I've never seen a DC stressed by excessive numbers of logins, but perhaps that is because I'be never worked at a really huge M$ site.

23 Servers, 120 Thin Clients, 25 fat clients Linux Thin Client 8 File (NFS/Samba) 2 Backup 1 Print 1 Intranet 1 VLE 2 Internet (Proxy/Filter) 2 Library (Koha) 1 CMIS/Eportal 2 Development/Other 3 It doesn't look a very efficient use of harware; I was pondering this the other day. I could combine 3 servers (print, intranet and development). We could also double the number of thin clients without increasing server capacity. We have lots of room to grow.

Probably, but I don't think that you can learn programming without using the command line. By then we are hoping that RM have climbed down from their ivory tower and realised that there other other operating systems to those provided by MickeySoft. As far as I can tell, if you are Apple users, you are out in the cold too, I see that old chestnust of teaching vs training arising again. When I was a uni and I first learned about relational databases, we didn't actually have one, so we emulated one using ISAM files. You don't need specific software to learn a concept. Also, *nix capable support staff should cost no more that M$ support staff, In fact they might well be cheaper, as they haven't got to repay the loan taken out to pay the high fees for their MCSE courses. (I speak from experience here, the £2500 that I spent doing mine was money that, in hindsight, I'd rather have spent elsewhere).