Re: [backstage] Make the primary OS used in state schools FOSS
On 09/02/2009 23:15, Christopher Woods chris...@infinitus.co.uk wrote: unless some incredibly well-designed thin client solutions were brought to my attention (and then you're talking equivalent prices for thin clients as you would for regular MiniATX desktops). I'm not sure that a thin client can, as you suggest, handle the requirements of a school's media department, in this instance you would place a desktop/tower instead. We run a mixed client setup for a number of housing associations in the UK where the majority of users (admin/management etc), who do not require huge graphics capability, run with a Wyse terminal and the planning department (for example) will have a well specced Dell machine. As you suggest a decent thin client will cost you as much as a MiniATX machine BUT it has much lower power consumption and have a potential life of 8 years or more. Typically a PC if having to run Windows will be lifed at 3 years. So after 3 years where a typical Windows environment will be replaced in toto we are simply adding more power to our VMWare server pool. I'm still personally very sceptical of thin client solutions, I don't think their capabilities ar sufficient to satisfy all the potential uses for educational machines. And I wouldn't like to have all that total reliance on just a handful of extremely powerful servers; it's bad enough when the Internet proxy server goes down or the network drive can't be accessed because the Active Directory is having a fit, but to have a classful of children sitting in front of dumb terminals when the primary host server for that classroom's client machines goes down? Wuh oh. You can run multiple head servers and backend pool for a TS environment. Maybe my mistrust is misplaced, and thin clients are actually really quite good at most things now... Perhaps my perception of them, like many other peoples', is part of the problem which needs to be addressed. There must be some reason other than bloody-mindedness that makes schools keep on going for full-PC solutions time after time though... Really? In my experience school IT staff are generally beholden to RM or similar and do as they are told. RM would see a MASSIVE drop in hardware sales if they pushed people onto thin client do to the reasons I list above. So I can't see them doing it anytime soon... I do aim to do more work in the educational sector as my own business gets going in the next few years, and I want to offer all kinds of viable solutions as long as they work well for everybody. Do you really think that setups like the LTSP are as competitive as regular networks of fairly powerful x86 machines and central file/print/etc servers for secondary school environments? (not being sarkies here, genuinely interested to know your thoughts and prepared to do a lot of reading if you have suggested starting points). I've unfortunately not had enough experience of a pure FOSS network and would definintely like to see more. My IT company are always looking to improve things! The couple of Ubuntu servers we run for Web Services/SVN etc are wonderfully reliable. But... //personal rant coming up... For any open source software (Linux for example) to really work on the network en mass we need to about user experience. Currently I've yet to see an attractive/user friendly piece of FOSS. Whilst the software (once you've worked out how to use it) is extremely effective IMO user experience is a big part of the software which usually gets overlooked in FOSS scenarios. I think FOSS can have a huge future but the community need to think about user experience then it will be taken more seriously.
Re: [backstage] Make the primary OS used in state schools FOSS
I think FOSS can have a huge future but the community need to think about user experience then it will be taken more seriously. FWIW I've just come back from FOSDEM (open source community event in Brussels), and there are plenty of open source projects now putting usability at the top of their requirements list - and are hiring accordingly. These include Ubuntu, Firefox (of course!), Drupal and Mediawiki. Those are just the ones I know about. Hopefully we'll see some positive results in the coming months and years. Phil On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 9:13 AM, Alun Rowe alun.r...@pentangle.co.ukwrote: On 09/02/2009 23:15, Christopher Woods chris...@infinitus.co.uk wrote: unless some incredibly well-designed thin client solutions were brought to my attention (and then you're talking equivalent prices for thin clients as you would for regular MiniATX desktops). I'm not sure that a thin client can, as you suggest, handle the requirements of a school's media department, in this instance you would place a desktop/tower instead. We run a mixed client setup for a number of housing associations in the UK where the majority of users (admin/management etc), who do not require huge graphics capability, run with a Wyse terminal and the planning department (for example) will have a well specced Dell machine. As you suggest a decent thin client will cost you as much as a MiniATX machine BUT it has much lower power consumption and have a potential life of 8 years or more. Typically a PC if having to run Windows will be lifed at 3 years. So after 3 years where a typical Windows environment will be replaced in toto we are simply adding more power to our VMWare server pool. I'm still personally very sceptical of thin client solutions, I don't think their capabilities ar sufficient to satisfy all the potential uses for educational machines. And I wouldn't like to have all that total reliance on just a handful of extremely powerful servers; it's bad enough when the Internet proxy server goes down or the network drive can't be accessed because the Active Directory is having a fit, but to have a classful of children sitting in front of dumb terminals when the primary host server for that classroom's client machines goes down? Wuh oh. You can run multiple head servers and backend pool for a TS environment. Maybe my mistrust is misplaced, and thin clients are actually really quite good at most things now... Perhaps my perception of them, like many other peoples', is part of the problem which needs to be addressed. There must be some reason other than bloody-mindedness that makes schools keep on going for full-PC solutions time after time though... Really? In my experience school IT staff are generally beholden to RM or similar and do as they are told. RM would see a MASSIVE drop in hardware sales if they pushed people onto thin client do to the reasons I list above. So I can't see them doing it anytime soon... I do aim to do more work in the educational sector as my own business gets going in the next few years, and I want to offer all kinds of viable solutions as long as they work well for everybody. Do you really think that setups like the LTSP are as competitive as regular networks of fairly powerful x86 machines and central file/print/etc servers for secondary school environments? (not being sarkies here, genuinely interested to know your thoughts and prepared to do a lot of reading if you have suggested starting points). I've unfortunately not had enough experience of a pure FOSS network and would definintely like to see more. My IT company are always looking to improve things! The couple of Ubuntu servers we run for Web Services/SVN etc are wonderfully reliable. But... //personal rant coming up... For any open source software (Linux for example) to really work on the network en mass we need to about user experience. Currently I've yet to see an attractive/user friendly piece of FOSS. Whilst the software (once you've worked out how to use it) is extremely effective IMO user experience is a big part of the software which usually gets overlooked in FOSS scenarios. I think FOSS can have a huge future but the community need to think about user experience then it will be taken more seriously. -- http://philwhitehouse.blogspot.com
Re: [backstage] Make the primary OS used in state schools FOSS
On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 9:13 AM, Alun Rowe alun.r...@pentangle.co.uk wrote: //personal rant coming up... For any open source software (Linux for example) to really work on the network en mass we need to about user experience. Currently I've yet to see an attractive/user friendly piece of FOSS. Anecdotally, I find that Inkscape is much better usability wise than Illustrator, and that Firefox is much less awful than IE's menu bar idiocy. The free desktop experience has become more unified as the Mac one has become more fragmented. Whilst the software (once you've worked out how to use it) is extremely effective IMO user experience is a big part of the software which usually gets overlooked in FOSS scenarios. I think FOSS can have a huge future but the community need to think about user experience then it will be taken more seriously. Be careful what you wish for: the current KDE 4 train wreck came from the developers focussing on user experience. It's an interface so godawful that everyone I have seen use it has been personally offended by it. ;-) The desktop user experience with Free Software is getting much better. For me personally it's become a non issue over the last two years (before then I might have agreed with you more). But for many people, usability equals familiarity; making it work as badly as Windows. ;-) - Rob. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] Make the primary OS used in state schools FOSS
On 10/02/2009 09:36, Rob Myers r...@robmyers.org wrote: On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 9:13 AM, Alun Rowe alun.r...@pentangle.co.uk wrote: //personal rant coming up... For any open source software (Linux for example) to really work on the network en mass we need to about user experience. Currently I've yet to see an attractive/user friendly piece of FOSS. Anecdotally, I find that Inkscape is much better usability wise than Illustrator, and that Firefox is much less awful than IE's menu bar idiocy. There are obviously exceptions to prove the rule :) Be careful what you wish for: the current KDE 4 train wreck came from the developers focussing on user experience. It's an interface so godawful that everyone I have seen use it has been personally offended by it. ;-) The problem with usability is that everyone has their own way of doing things! The desktop user experience with Free Software is getting much better. For me personally it's become a non issue over the last two years (before then I might have agreed with you more). It is getting better but it's still not 'Dad' proof (My dad has an extremely short fuse when it comes to computers having programmed them since he left school (with punch cards!) through to RPG based Advanced 36's). Once my dad is happy using them then the revolution may begin! But for many people, usability equals familiarity; making it work as badly as Windows. ;-) Firstly, not everything about Windows is bad, but I grant you lots of it is! Secondly I'm not sure that people want it to be just like Windows. Lots of people try Macs and complain for about 30 minutes about it then when you try to take the machine away at the end of the day they threaten you with violence... People WILL move but it has to be BETTER rather than different.
RE: [backstage] Make the primary OS used in state schools FOSS
-Original Message- From: owner-backst...@lists.bbc.co.uk [mailto:owner-backst...@lists.bbc.co.uk] On Behalf Of Richard Smedley Sent: 09 February 2009 18:32 To: backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk Subject: RE: [backstage] Make the primary OS used in state schools FOSS PCs in schools are mandated to teach curriculum areas - this can easily be delivered through 500 - 600 web apps. The whole curriculum. A small investment from government (less than 1% of the UK's annual school IT spend) would get all of these apps written. Released under the GNU GPL, they would be tweaked and improved by thousands of teachers and students. You mean like BBC Jam? Can't see how this idea wouldn't end up in the European Court for the same reasons. -- Gareth Davis | Production Systems Specialist World Service Future Media, Digital Delivery Team - Part of BBC Global News Division * http://www.bbcworldservice.com/ * 702NE Bush House, Strand, London, WC2B 4PH - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
RE: [backstage] Make the primary OS used in state schools FOSS
On Mon, 2009-02-09 at 23:15 +, Christopher Woods wrote: different in its model, aiming itself as it does as a social enterprise for the voluntary and educational sectors. How many schools do you serve in your locality? (just curious...) Your model obviously works exceptionally well for what you do, but I wonder how big your client base is versus how big it could potentially be if you supported every school in the area - you could get very big, very fast, or the ground could open up for competition and aside from lower costs to the end users, there might be an even greater disparity in levels of support or the kinds of solutions delivered. As I said in the previous e-mail, school support doesn't scale well. We work through schools to reach families on the wrong side of the digital divide, and also to work with local community organisations, but don't bother offering IT support to the education market - it simply isn't worth it :-/ The model of maintaining individually-installed apps over several discrete PCs was all very well in the 80s, and possibly the 90s, but how long before schools catch up with the rest of the world. PCs in schools are mandated to teach curriculum areas - this can easily be delivered through 500 - 600 web apps. The whole curriculum. A small investment from government (less than 1% of the UK's annual school IT spend) would get all of these apps written. Released under the GNU GPL, they would be tweaked and improved by thousands of teachers and students. Given web apps, designed to work with standards-compliant browsers, it becomes irrelevant which platform is used to view them, save on grounds of cost and maintainability. The obvious choice then is LTSP. Personal opinion: 95% of web apps just don't cut it. If you're talking about I'm suggesting 500 or 600 wholly new web apps, designed to cover the whole curriculum. A framework would be specified, and commissions given to *UK* developers - including bids from schools. Of course the EU won't let us do it, but there's probably a creative way to frame the tender process. After all, other countries manage. If I was a teacher I would hate it hate it hate it if I couldn't teach a class because the main host server was bogged down with too many intensive tasks, or it fell over or lagged out or needed to be failed over for some reason. Look at some real world LTSP in schools. Skegness http://schoolforge.org.uk/index.php/Skegness_Grammar have multiple application servers, and seem to have experienced zero downtime so far. to be desired. If I was speccing a school's IT, I don't think thin clients would get much way past the first round of planning unless some incredibly well-designed thin client solutions were brought to my attention (and then you're talking equivalent prices for thin clients as you would for regular MiniATX desktops). As has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread, thin clients have a long life (average 8 to 9 years). A point used by Sun in its sales - and the result can be seen in at least one high street bank, and many other large businesses. I'm still personally very sceptical of thin client solutions, I don't think their capabilities ar sufficient to satisfy all the potential uses for educational machines. Music and video editing obviously need their own high-power PCs. And I wouldn't like to have all that total reliance on just a handful of extremely powerful servers; it's bad enough when the Internet proxy server goes down or the network drive can't be accessed because the Active Directory is having a fit, but to have a classful of children sitting in front of dumb terminals when the primary host server for that classroom's client machines goes down? Wuh oh. Last year Salford University moved its School of Computing to thin client - it's saved them no end of problems. Single-point-of-failure risks are easily addressed, but 100s of individual machines will always be a pain :-( In many (most?) of the school labs that I have visited, half of the (Windows) PCs are not working properly - e.g. CD tray will not open - due to creative play from the students (e.g. constantly opening and closing the tray). A malfunctioning PC is an expensive piece of junk. A broken thin client at Skegness Grammar goes in the recycling, and a new one comes out of the cupboard: 30 seconds later it's up and running. There must be some reason other than bloody-mindedness that makes schools keep on going for full-PC solutions time after time though... When you don't know enough to make a purchasing decision, you just buy what everyone else does. Going any other way takes a brave Head Teacher, and Heads have enough on their plates. I do aim to do more work in the educational sector as my own business gets going in the next few years, and I want to offer all kinds of viable solutions as long as they work well for everybody. Do you really think that setups like the
RE: [backstage] Make the primary OS used in state schools FOSS
A postscript: Anyone interested in helping to improve the IT situation in schools (through FOSS) may be interested in membership of Schoolforge-UK. http://groups.google.com/group/sf-uk-discuss/about The website contains many case studies, and the (low traffic) mailing list a number of interesting threads on the subject. SF-UK is also involved in organising events such as FLOSSIE (Free Libre Open Source Software in Education) - the next one takes place in July. Cheers, - Richard - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] Make the primary OS used in state schools FOSS
On 10 Feb 2009, at 17:57, Richard Smedley wrote: I'm suggesting 500 or 600 wholly new web apps, designed to cover the whole curriculum. A framework would be specified, and commissions given to *UK* developers - including bids from schools. Of course the EU won't let us do it, but there's probably a creative way to frame the tender process. After all, other countries manage. Mark Shuttleworth is developing a set of education material coursework that can be freely distributed. I met someone at the Over The Air event last year who had been working on it, based out of South Africa of course but intended for worldwide distribution. f - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
RE: [backstage] Make the primary OS used in state schools FOSS
On Mon, 2009-02-09 at 16:12 +, Christopher Woods wrote: Given that many schools' IT infrastructure development was so organic and self-funded throughout the 90s, they are now in the situation where it is almost completely impractical to start from scratch with a FOSS OS and FOSS software, making sure that interdependencies aren't broken, networking works as well (or as expected) as prior to the switch, and students - and staff alike - aren't 'de-familiarised' with the setup. With any major transition such as an OS move, there's a lot of retraining needed for staff and students. When you run to such a tight timeline as most schools do, there just aren't enough hours in the day to accomplish this. You seem to be saying that although the status quo is not good (indeed, it is delivering a second-cless education), there's no easy way out, so let's leave things as they are. If I have mis-characterised your argument, I apologise, but let's sidestep that. After all, you're barking up the wrong tree. The model of maintaining individually-installed apps over several discrete PCs was all very well in the 80s, and possibly the 90s, but how long before schools catch up with the rest of the world. PCs in schools are mandated to teach curriculum areas - this can easily be delivered through 500 - 600 web apps. The whole curriculum. A small investment from government (less than 1% of the UK's annual school IT spend) would get all of these apps written. Released under the GNU GPL, they would be tweaked and improved by thousands of teachers and students. Given web apps, designed to work with standards-compliant browsers, it becomes irrelevant which platform is used to view them, save on grounds of cost and maintainability. The obvious choice then is LTSP. I believe the sad fact is that much FOSS isn't as well or reliably supported where it matters because there just isn't as much money in it. Again, chicken and the egg. Schools are a difficult market for a support company. Maintaining two or three is easy enough for anyone. Beyond that it won't scale well until you're covering all of an LEA :-( How as a FOSS company are you going to maintain a well-staffed callout team and helpdesk if the software you are providing is essentially free? Why is that a problem? My companies have never had a problem charging for support for Free Software. All software needs support. You can't justify far higher support contract charges for that reason alone, and schools will either bring the required talent in-house Schools don't pay enough to attract good suport staff :-( or source it locally - and bingo, just like that, your company is out of business. So think local. How many schols are there within 40 miles of you? - Richard -- Richard Smedley, r...@m6-it.org Technical Director, www.M6-IT.org M6-IT CIC+44 (0)779 456 07 14 Sustainable Third Sector IT solutions. PRINCE2[TM] Project Management Web services * Back-ups * Support * Training Certification * E-Mail M6-IT is a Community Interest Company, limited by guarantee. Registered in England Wales, Registration No: 6040154 11 St Marks Road, Stourbridge, West Midlands, DY9 7DT Northern Office: 4, Hollins Green, Bradwall, Cheshire, CW10 0LA. Welsh office/Swyddfa Gogledd Cymru: e-mail / e-bost - cy...@m6-it.org Southern Office: Oxford contact matt...@m6-it.org - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] Make the primary OS used in state schools FOSS
2009/2/9 Richard Smedley r...@m6-it.org: curriculum areas - this can easily be delivered through 500 - 600 web apps. The whole curriculum. A small investment from government (less than 1% of the UK's annual school IT spend) would get all of these apps written. Released under the GNU GPL, Affero GPL ought to be used for new web-apps :-) http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl.html Cheers, Dave (Personal views only) - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] Make the primary OS used in state schools FOSS
On Mon, 2009-02-09 at 19:15 +, Dave Crossland wrote: 2009/2/9 Richard Smedley r...@m6-it.org: curriculum areas - this can easily be delivered through 500 - 600 web apps. The whole curriculum. A small investment from government (less than 1% of the UK's annual school IT spend) would get all of these apps written. Released under the GNU GPL, Affero GPL ought to be used for new web-apps :-) Good point. Although I had in mind putting the apps on the school's intranet server, in which case GPL would be adequate. However there would doubtless be a market for remote delivery. - Richard -- Richard Smedley,www.m6-it.org PRINCE2[TM] Project Management. Interactive Websites. GTD seminars. OpenOffice training and certification. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
Re: [backstage] Make the primary OS used in state schools FOSS
2009/2/9 Richard Smedley r...@m6-it.org: Good point. Although I had in mind putting the apps on the school's intranet server, in which case GPL would be adequate. However there would doubtless be a market for remote delivery. Affero is still important for intranets; The plain GPL does not protect the rights of users of a program, only those of the systems administrators who install it on the server. - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
RE: [backstage] Make the primary OS used in state schools FOSS
How as a FOSS company are you going to maintain a well-staffed callout team and helpdesk if the software you are providing is essentially free? Why is that a problem? My companies have never had a problem charging for support for Free Software. All software needs support. You can't justify far higher support contract charges for that reason alone, and schools will either bring the required talent in-house Schools don't pay enough to attract good suport staff :-( or source it locally - and bingo, just like that, your company is out of business. So think local. How many schols are there within 40 miles of you?= (by the way Richard, I believe we may have conversed before this evening, offline :) Thistle, last year?) Oh, there are many schools in my area. There's one about a third of a mile away from my doorstep! You seem to be saying that although the status quo is not good (indeed, it is delivering a second-cless education), there's no easy way out, so let's leave things as they are. If I have mis-characterised your argument, I apologise, but let's sidestep that. After all, you're barking up the wrong tree. You're somewhat on target; my final comment on this for the time being is that I think the current situation is far from ideal, but I freely admit that I have no fantastical solution which will make everything better. (the educational goldmine?) I know that M6-IT is somewhat unique in how it operates, including recycling legacy gear and giving it a new lease of life with quality FOSS to provide custom solutions that fit in where other proprietary solutions may not have worked as efficiently (it's a great thing!) - but M6 is also slightly different in its model, aiming itself as it does as a social enterprise for the voluntary and educational sectors. How many schools do you serve in your locality? (just curious...) Your model obviously works exceptionally well for what you do, but I wonder how big your client base is versus how big it could potentially be if you supported every school in the area - you could get very big, very fast, or the ground could open up for competition and aside from lower costs to the end users, there might be an even greater disparity in levels of support or the kinds of solutions delivered. I suppose the one sad fact about the current MS incumbency is that there can be some predictable level of consistency throughout the LEA. I'm fed up to the back teeth as much as anyone at some counties (including where my parents live) where the council has a massive arrangement with Dell - for the kind of service they get, they must literally parachute bags of money into Dell's UK HQ, and I think it's good money mostly wasted. The model of maintaining individually-installed apps over several discrete PCs was all very well in the 80s, and possibly the 90s, but how long before schools catch up with the rest of the world. PCs in schools are mandated to teach curriculum areas - this can easily be delivered through 500 - 600 web apps. The whole curriculum. A small investment from government (less than 1% of the UK's annual school IT spend) would get all of these apps written. Released under the GNU GPL, they would be tweaked and improved by thousands of teachers and students. Given web apps, designed to work with standards-compliant browsers, it becomes irrelevant which platform is used to view them, save on grounds of cost and maintainability. The obvious choice then is LTSP. Personal opinion: 95% of web apps just don't cut it. If you're talking about SaaS, the problems highlighted by Salesforce.com's recent downtime are testament to that - and as I'm sure you're well aware, school timetables and the National Curriculum have even less margin for troubleshooting IT than even the business sector. If I was a teacher I would hate it hate it hate it if I couldn't teach a class because the main host server was bogged down with too many intensive tasks, or it fell over or lagged out or needed to be failed over for some reason. There's a new build school in Bucks which is currently under construction; unfortunately it looks like not enough forethought was paid to the IT infrastructure so it becomes horrendously unfeasible, perhaps even impossible, to implement the kind of high quality, high bandwidth and low latency network a totally thin-client based network would require. (right down to simple things such as impossible corners for bundles of fibre to go round, poorly chosen rooms for network nodes in context of rooms where computers will be installed, and architectural features that can't have ducting run along them as it would spoil the visual presentation! So the fibre has to take a massively long route all the way around instead, hugely increasing the cost.) Of course, not every school is (hopefully) going to be designed like this, but it's not great... I think a lot of educational ICT systems have these kinds
RE: [backstage] Make the primary OS used in state schools FOSS
bits and bobs snipped Note I'm not affiliated with these groups, nor am I a teacher, just showing that working, LEA-or-bigger SaaS *is* being delivered because of that better resourcing. It warms the cockles of my very being to hear that some organisations can get it right :) I wonder how much of it is mainly down to clueful people at the reins? BathNES seems to have come a long way... But then we in Wiltshire were always the poor relation to upper middle class BaNES ;) (lived in Wiltshire for 14 years when I were but a nipper :) BucksCC with the SEGfL is currently in the process of implementing a few gigs of storage (think it's 10?) + hosted email + docs + VLE + workspace for every single primary and secondary pupil in the county, with several years' retention and remote access, all the other gubbins... A truly titanic investment and development of infrastructure, which central Government /is/ paying for, handily. Every so often I ask about how it's progressing and I just get a weary look in my direction! I think in the end a proprietary solution /was/ chosen over the alternatives because it was just faster, easier and more beneficial to implement, having on balance the best interoperability with the other existing infrastructure and all the other essentials. I must ask the old man for some more information because I know things have changed since we last talked about it too. What is BathNES using for its base infrastructure? School network reliability aside, many Universities across the UK are deploying thin clients as we speak, my current employer (the University of Bath) has rolled out something like 400 in the past 12 months, without any significant problems. A number of other universities have had similar experiences. Bath are rolling out Sun Ray machines, as are, again, some of the other universities. All the components you mention above are probably equally as important - if the AD server goes down for a day and no-one can log in? Wuh oh. If the proxy is down and a teacher can't show the class the youtube video of a science experiment or get them to do some research for a project? Wuh oh. Yes, very true, my analogy works both ways. However, there's always the fact that unless something catastrophic happens to the authentication server (of which hopefully there's more than one if it's a large network) there's that much more of an incentive to get it fixed! In the meantime, if people are already logged on, hopefully the system will let them stay logged on because they already have validated credentials for that session. Thin client server goes down... Caput. I've witnessed my fair share of cockups and poor adminning at a network level as a luser in some of the schools I've been in (including some hair-tearingly frustrating ones... Classfuls of roaming profiles loading over a 100mbps network at the start of each lesson anyone?) but a catastrophic failure of some element of the network in a regular 'standalone' machine infrastructure won't be *quite* as catastrophic to the people who are currently using the system as if they were on thin clients... ... That said, do the Sun machines have some kind of stateful 'stasis' mode where the full state of each person's session is restored after a reboot of the host server? Of course if uptime is the #1 essential then you're going to have multiple host servers, but then you still need all the other bits and pieces AND you need multiple huge, sweaty beasts of machines to power the entire school's computing needs. And then you end up with compartmentalised networks, multiple host servers to look after in physically different locations... I can quickly see it becoming as much of an administrative nightmare as a sprawling standalone network. Pros and cons I suppose... I look forward to the time when thin clients become usable enough to fully replace desktops in some scenarios, because then we'll all get more desk space :D As a side note, I can guarantee Dave that educational software from five years ago that is essential in the classroom today does not run under Wine even now :) Can I put a fiver on that? I have a feeling that most schools would carry on using their existing setups regardless because it's too much hassle to change. Oops, forgot you did actually say that :) I forget I say stuff too, happens all the time. :/ - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
