Currently I am swamped with homework and projects so all of the advocacy
and Linux in school projects are on hold until late December unless
others step up to the plate. Please read the following project status
and let me know if you can help.
I have decided to take a semester off of college during Spring 2003 in
order to focus on Linux research, development and advocacy. I will
spend all of my time until Fall 2003 working on the following projects.
1) "Linux for Education Showcase" at Mid-Pacific Institute
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We are rapidly approaching a point at MPI where Linux servers and LDAP
central authentication will be adopted. Late December we will begin to
transition all the teachers from the current unstable Windows based
e-mail server to Linux (uw imap, Sendmail, SpamAssassin, Vipul's Razor,
virus scanning). This e-mail server roll-out will be the beginning of
Linux based LDAP central authentication on Mid-Pac campus. Immediately
upon LDAP implementation, the LTSP thin client lab will use LDAP for
authentication. Before mid-2003 we will integrate the Windows clients
on the school network with LDAP/Samba.
http://diradmin.open-it.org/
We will be using "Directory Administrator" in order to easily manage
LDAP authentication.
MPI is also in the process of implementing another LTSP thin client lab
in lower campus. This will probably occur sometime around January.
Late December we are converting all Windows machines to use Mozilla as
the campus standard browser, replacing the deprecated Netscape 4.x.
I personally will need to learn much about LDAP, Samba and Windows
domain configuration in order to make this happen. I hope that I can
get assistance from the community on these tasks.
With all of these Linux and Open Source solutions being implemented at
Mid-Pac, Mid-Pac will be a Showcase of "Linux for Education" systems.
We will invite educators from other schools, public and private to let
them see what Open Source Software can do with low costs and high
reliability. We will show them how the community will take active roles
in implementation and maintenance of Open Source solutions at their schools.
2) St. John the Baptist LTSP lab and Firewall
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A while ago Wilson Chan, Ray Strode and I configured a LTSP lab and
Linux based firewall at St. John the Baptist school in Kalihi. The
firewall has been working great, unfortunately the LTSP server kept
locking up due to hardware problems. Currently Ray Strode is analyzing
the server. We may need to replace the motherboard. Wayne Liauh had
donated a complete Athlon system to Mililani High School but it is no
longer needed (read below about Mililani), so we may be able to use this
motherboard in the St. John server. We will also need $50 print server
appliance for the school.
After the server is made stable, we will need to configure the LTSP
server to be ready for student usage. While the K12LTSP distribution
does most of this work for us, there are many little modifications that
should be made to the default user profiles in order to simplify the
desktops for the users.
St. John's LTSP server is only a single 1.2GHz Athlon processor and 1GB
of RAM, so I suspect this will not be enough power for the 12-15 clients
that they hope to run.
3) Mililani High School and Linux
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Wayne Liauh had donated a complete Athlon 1GHz system to Mililani High
School that would be used as a Oracle Linux server. Later it turned out
that they had a spare Dell server already at the school and they will be
using that machine for Oracle on Linux during Spring 2003. This
motherboard may be able to stabilize the unstable St. John LTSP server.
Wayne, do you want the parts back if they are not needed, or can I
appropriate this for another server at some school?
Mililani's SunRay lab is currently working, but poorly configured and
running ancient software. During the Christmas break after December
18th we will need to go into their lab and completely re-install the
server. I hope to use the following software on their Sun Enterprise
450 server: Solaris 9, Gnome2, StarOffice 6 SP1, Gimp.
I will need considerable assistance between December 18th through 20th
with this server because I have almost zero experience with Sun hardware
and Solaris.
4) Future Linux for schools projects
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I have demonstrated Mid-Pac's LTSP lab to educators from Kaimuki High
School, St. Louis, and Mililani High School about the possibility of
implementing LTSP at their schools. While they were impressed by what
they have seen, there is a considerable amount of difficulty involved in
implementation and I ran out of time to follow up.
Fortunately during Spring 2003 I will have much more time to talk to the
schools and demonstrate LTSP to educators, so hopefully we will be able
to get this started at more schools during that period. Please let me
know if you have any other schools that would be prime candidates for
this, and try to convince some of their educators (principles and sys
admins are the best) to check out Mid-Pac's Linux lab.
5) ITEC?
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Last month Brian Low said he would arrange for a booth at ITEC but I had
heard nothing from him since. Since I have heard nothing about this and
we have had no planning meetings, I'm assuming that we will not be at
ITEC this year. Even if I do hear from Brian at this point it is too
late, I'm too busy to throw together booth demos and handouts.
Warren Togami
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
