IMHO, please dispense away with the "local" hard disk concept and go the LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) way. Baskar, who has already participated in this thread, has a lot of experience with LTSP as well as thin clients and he is located in Greater Chennai.
1. Maintain "desktop" servers that caters to the interest of the student body -- let them learn the software first and then get them into the hardware aspects. Others have discussed the pros/cons vis-a-vis the desktop choice. 2. The 'local' disks can be bunched together to create "storage" servers and/or create on premise "cloud" storage like ownCloud. 3. Also suggest, filter out students into "developer" and "admin" tracks based on their aptitude, the mindset required for them is different IMO. Let those with "admin" aptitude delve into sysadmin/netadmin and those with "developer" aptitude go into simple application development. 4. Take the KISS (Keep It Simple and Stupid) approach and build upon that. I am confident that we will discover a few nuggets in this initiative. Best, -- Arun Khan _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc ILUGC Mailing List Guidelines: http://ilugc.in/mailinglist-guidelines
