At 11:06 PM -0500 11/17/01, Jim McQuillan wrote:
>Jared,
>
>Sounds like a worthy project.
>
>Have you thought about how to handle the differences
>between Linux distros ? Redhat, SuSE and Debian all
>have different ways of starting/stopping services.
>
>Jim McQuillan
>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
This email addresses a number of emails from the list at one time.
At the moment we are aiming our work simply towards Mandrake. That's
what we have up and running, and since most of the guys working on
the project are programming novices, we are mostly going to focus on
file manipulation and information retrieval scripts for the
foreseeable future. That's the best I think we will be doing for
now. So, the restart scripts will be setup to deal with one system
(and similar ones of course) at the moment. I hope to deal with this
issue in the future, and would hope that some of it would be dealt
with in the open source project, as we will have a lot of difficulty
testing multiple environments (we are trying to make this test lab a
working system at the same time, so we can't really play as much
right now).
Also, a number of people have mentioned the K12ltsp project. I
checked into it, its okay, but I think we will still need to follow
through with this kind of a project -- and if we do a decent job, our
work could be useful to them as well. I really think that there are
a few main keys that will be required for us to move ltsp into other
schools.
The first K12LTSP may have already handled--easy installation. But
I'd rather not see "easy installation" defined as using only one
distro platform.
The second, and much harder to accomplish, is easy to use
administration. To solve this problem correctly you have to take into
account the users of the system. In this case, those people are
likely to be computer hobbyists. While myself and my colleagues don't
have problems with the current admin tools, we have lots of
experience with Unix and other OSes, most people working in schools
don't have that experience. I have yet to see admin tools that are
acceptable to this group in the Linux space. That's not a rant,
that's just me saying that the group of people we are trying to
target is not the group that Linux is usually aimed at. So, the goal
of our admin tools would be to simplify the administration
necessities down to the basics (auto-detecting NIC cards was a big
help in this by the way) and try to represent the data at an
extremely high level--a level most unix admins would probably
dislike. Most likely, the data as we display will have little
resemblance to how it is stored.
Part three is simpler file layout for applications. I think that we
may try to steal something from the Darwin project and create a more
central (and obvious) location for applications that are shared
across the entire user base. I think Apple has something here,
particularly as it effects the users that we are targeting.
Also, I am uncertain that webmin is an adequate solution for this
environment, so I am still aiming for a GUI application on top of
command line tools. This will provide a better user environment than
web, and most lab admins will be administering from the lab itself
anyway (in a school environment). That is also one less server that
doesn't have to run and be admined, maintained, or updated. Also, I
am currently of the opinion that we should do our remote monitoring,
etc with SNMPv3, which could be more useful for the district level
admins who are the ones who will be interested in remote performance
monitoring, etc. This capability would work much better into general
monitoring tools they my already have.
I am going to go ahead and begin the process of setting up a new
SourceForge project tomorrow. I will keep this list updated on our
progress and announce any development in our early scripts--we will
definitely be interested in comments.
Jared
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