mattcrum

I work on a lot of projects in schools in developing countries and I am exploring the different traffic shaping options available. The issue is that I don't want to get sucked into yearly licenses since most of the schools I work in are in countries that don't have credit or budget down the road for this type of stuff. For example, I really like the options that Meraki provides, but the price is way too high and has yearly licenses. We currently use a lot of Mikrotik routers which can do this stuff, but it's complicated to do QoS and traffic shaping and is challenging to train new locals to be able to administer. There are some cool products like EasyTomato (easytomato.org) which may be what I end up relying on, but I would prefer to not flash any hardware. That whole simplicity thing just gets a bit ruined. If the yearly licenses were really reasonable and cheap, I could potentially front-load the cost, but when I frontload devices like Meraki, the cost is way too high to try to sell when I compare it to our current Mikrotik setup. Credit cards in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa is unavailable as well, even for businesses, so another knock against yearly payments. Anyone have any ideas on stuff to look into? Desired features include fair usage for bandwidth management and maybe service throttling for stuff like p2p traffic and bittorrent.

I have had a great experience with the Synology NAS I purchased. It is very easy to use. I really love the wide array of things it can do out of the box and the capabilities DiskStation Manager provides. I am comparing it to my use of Drobo, and the Synology just seems to allow you to do more for less. The only thing the Drobo has on it is it's not as sexy looking as the Drobo.

Thanks! I have a Pi set up and running currently. I need to run some stress tests on it to see what it can handle. It was pretty easy to get running. I think this will be a great solution to offer! Thanks for the thorough directions. This is great. With that being said, one of the things that would be really ideal is also have an out of the box alternative solution. The organization I work for is a not-for-profit and we work with a lot of local ICT professionals in developing countries in rural areas that may not have much linux experience. The issue with stuff like the Pi that makes me nervous for some of the schools we work in is the ability to troubleshoot locally if the hardware changes or there needs to be any deviation from the directions I would initially provide for setup. Some folks we work with are great with this stuff, but others have less experience can find stuff like the Pi intimidating.

This is a great idea! In my particular circumstance, I will be deploying web servers in multiple schools and can't count on old machines being available. This, in fact, will be the first go round with technology for these schools as they will be primarily in rural areas in different parts of the world. Shadowx, that's helpful. You know what the easiest way to get a stack of apache, php, mysql running on linux? I will be training foreign IT professionals and their competencies may not (probably not) necessarily linux-based web server management. I'm looking for something simple as XAMPP on Mac to install and run. (That's an ideal case anyway). I will also look into ISPconfig. Good suggestion! dhicks, I actually have a Raspberry Pi around the lab here. I was also thinking about using that. You think the RAM is competent to serve only like...40 clients? What do you think? Thanks for all the quick responses!

I hear very good things about Synology. Their feature list is quite impressive. I am buying one today. If you're interested, I can follow up with a review.

Anyone have any recommended local web servers? One that will run stuff like Apache, php, mysql? Looking for a cheap/low power option. I've looked at a couple different options including using a Synology NAS which seems like it may be the easiest at this point vs something like those plug computers like the GuruPlug Server. The machine doesn't have to be fast, just work reliably.

Thanks for the help friends. Glennda, I love your setup style idea. That may be directly applicable. I may try to set up replication across a Synology NAS. We'll see what's possible with that setup. It looks like I'm going to have to figure this stuff out with Samba4. I'm a non-profit NGO worker so licensing with Microsoft looks like its going to be a hot mess... Including with SCCM...which I would like to use, but the licensing is literally dizzying and the cost seems to skyrocket.

Thanks a lot. This is helpful. You bring up an important part: cost. I rarely begin to understand Microsoft's licensing strategies. The alternative of Samba may be very valuable. Also due to cost, some of these schools are in places that may not have the technical capacity to maintain a domain controller per school. They may have to be maintained regionally. The goal with this is to essentially image the machines, put them in these classrooms, and have enough control over them that if something goes wrong, we can issue a patch or some sort of fix. If there is any new educational content to distribute down, I would also like to be able to issue those through a domain controller. I realize sporadic internet and low bandwidth could pose as problems in these situations. I'm hoping that I can figure out some way to just collect the stuff like content updates as internet is available in the background without the user's knowledge...

Hi guys. I am designing a system that involved deployments of machines across schools in different regions. I am thinking of setting up Active Directory to manage these schools. I come here asking for advice as I am a newbie to AD. I get the overall theory I think, and I am really excited with the GP settings and whatnot, but many of the schools the computers will be in will have either low bandwidth or sporadic connections which makes me nervous about using this technology. I also don't want to make the students to physically have to login the machine with their own account. I'd prefer the option at some of the schools to be able to just start the computer, it connects to the domain if it can, and it just does its thing with no user interaction required. Any suggestions or insights? I am setting up Active Directory on Win Server 2012 in my lab. Also any other resources would be great that you may have come across. Thanks! Matt

I am running Windows Multipoint 2011. I want to run either Firefox, Safari, or Chrome as the default browser, however I cannot get them to open on different stations simultaneously without creating individual profiles. This typically wouldn't be a problem, except that there will be multiple users logged into the same profile simultaneously. Anyone have any ideas on how I could get this to work? IE obviously works fine, but some things do not support IE and I would like the users to have access to Firefox or Chrome. Thanks guys!

Just an update to the solution to my issues: permissions. Apparently the files on the server that were copied over had some permissions that also were copied over that were unexpected. Windows permissions are making my head spin... NTFS... Share... "public folder"... and the combination of the three... x_x

Thanks for the new post. Local group policy. I set administratively assigned GPO on the user first and then I did both user and computer.

I am having some real frustration getting local group policy working with offline files. Basically the environment this will be used in is one server that will host the files that are to be synced with laptops that will do the syncing. I've set the "Assign offline files administratively" policy with the network path as well as a few other configurations such as when to sync and whatnot and I have not had any luck getting this to work. Just nothing happens. I am missing something, I think. Is this feature for machines running on a domain only? I've looked through the documentation a few times and I've not came across anything at this point and I'm hoping one of you could provide me with some insight. It would be much appreciated. Basically after setting this group policy, I run gpupdate /force and restart the machine to no avail. When I right click on the folder in which I am wanting to sync, I can still see the "Make available offline" option and it is unchecked. Any insight would be much appreciated. Thanks!!

Thanks so much psydii. Very helpful and seems this helps me get on the right track. If I have any issues I'll reply back. I'll try and remember to post my solution.

Thanks for the tip. I understand that. I want an application to be able to know when WSUS is complete so it can perform certain functions afterwards in an automated fashion without any user interaction. I think WSUS has an API but I may just be able to read from the log. I haven't done this before so I'm not sure if there is a "right" way to do this.