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Mobile IT Education?
SickKiwi asks: "A
client, a local polytechnic, has recently asked me to come up with
plans for a mobile IT bus to bring technology to rural areas. I
would love to find out what other people in the field have come up
with in the way of workstation layout, OS choices and Internet
connectivity. There doesn't appear to be a huge amount of material
available but as the technology gets smaller, mobile classrooms
become more and more practical." What vehicles would work best
for this kind of application? A converted bus? A mobile home? An
18-wheeler with a heavily customized trailer? What kind of hardware
would you put in it?
Modified school bus with every other row removed, a server near the front running dumb linux terminals (for heat, space, costs issues) running star office (most places use msoffice but star is very close in interface) with gecko for browsing (keeping it lite). if available run packet radio or if not i would have to say cell for internet uplinks...
all said and done that would make an interesting project.... want help?
#include sig.h
What our organization built was a mobile rack on wheels that holds holds 20 iMacs with an Airport wireless station.
In our case, DHCP addresses are supplied by a in-building server (cart is mobile within the building). Adding a NAT/DHCP server wouldn't be hard -- connectivity then only has to be to the NAT box. The new Airports (50 connections, 128 bit security, NAT) look cool and might ease this step markedly).
The rack can be wheeled to where it's needed and the portables readied for use within minutes. Wireless eliminates the cabling problem at the site and makes doing maintenance "back at the shop" pretty easy.
The cart is physically about 5 X 4 X 2 feet on modestly large wheels. Crafting something that could be lifted into a van or even split across several boxes should be straightforward.
The nice aspect is the approach can be used if a bus with seating is available, but also wheeled into a building where a substantial room is available.
Connectivity will always hard regardless of the final design. Telephone some places, ethernet others, wireless (2.4 gig is becoming common in rural areas), even the Hughes satellite link (saw it at Comdex), might be reasonable. I suspect that connectivity will actually be one of the toughest aspects of the design. You might even end up wanting to ensure a dedicated link back to "something" ala what TV stations use for remotes (the vans with antennas that can telescope to 50 feet).
The iMac/airport solution is cheap, allowing money to be spent on ensuring good I-net connectivity (the hard part of this task I believe).