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A School District's Education in Free Software
david.jonathan.russe writes "The school district in Kamloops, BC, Canada has been working on a linux-based terminal infrastructure for several years. They now have a system in place district wide and they can not keep up with all of the requests for info. They have a great hybrid system, using diskless workstations all booting from local servers. 'The second-generation system cost the Kamloops district about $47,000 to implement, as well as the cost of training and the release time for personal study and taking exams. However, Ferrie has no doubt of the savings overall. License costs are disappearing as the district phases out its Novell NetWare licenses, and the district no longer needs to purchase productivity software. Ferrie also figures that the increased reliability represents a substantial savings, although he admits that it is hard to quantify. However, perhaps the greatest benefit of switching to free software is that the reliability of the new system frees up technical staff to do more than routine support.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
the IT staff having to process all the requests for info from other school districts ;-).
Actually, congrats to them. In areas where you have competent IT staff and are willing to do the work yourself, Linux offers great cost savings *and* the ability to have a system tailored exactly to your needs. Other places, it just offers the latter.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
no mention in the article of which distro or if many distros that were implemented...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
All the problems that companies have with OSS, like having to train their supporters and techs, or a fear of loss of productivity due to unknown software, don't apply for schools. They usually have a fair lot of clued students at their hands who would gladly offer support in exchange for additional credit or at least other services the school can provide (like net access and so on), and the loss of productivity is, if it applies at all, on the head of the student, not the school.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I had to laugh... when I clicked to the article, the embedded ad was this ad that people were switching from linux to windows servers....
_ 336x280_DEF.gif
http://spe.atdmt.com/b/NMMRTUMISITP/mrs06245_swit
The above comments are not guaranteed to make sense to anyone other than the author...
I was pleased to read about how they handled staffing issues, with help and support for the people to retrain and time off to train in their own time and to get good qualifications. That's just good management. Bringing people to open source software will probably need initiatives like this to reassure people that the skills that they have won't now be wasted...
Good effort by them.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
It's not about saving money. Campaign donations and influence rule.
Kc schools want laptops for all the students. Yikes. More higher property taxes.
I heard there's a place in Florida that's NOT building any schools just to stop the ever increasing taxes that schools create.
Time and time again, this architecture proved to overwhelm resources of local client that can not access swap space, become sluggish at inconvenient times as network and/or server is overwhelmed, completely drop the connection and lose all user's changes because of a congestion, intermittent noise in the LAN or just someone kicking the cable, fail to reboot most of the machines after a power outage, making it difficult to impossible for the user to get his own data from a USB drive, require unnecessary amount of effort to make an extra application available to a particular user... And still control freaks everywhere are pushing for an architecture that inhibits user creativity, kills performance and suffers frequent outages.
There are decent alternatives though, such as a fast, convenient way to re-image the machine over the network. It doesn't require any more IT support, as the user would be required to do this with a machine where he is experiencing problems before any other investigation is done. I had this setup on a NeXT network around 20 years ago.
Schools should use free software. They should educate their students about their digital freedom. They should expand their Microsoft-only view.
Why do you think no non-geeks care about digital freedom in our time? They don't know what freedom of software is like, because no one educated them.
Competent IT professionals already know that transferability of skills and adaptablility are the hallmarks of a successful career. Government workers are nothing more than whining children who probably would never survive in the real world marketplace. However, at least these government workers were able to adapt and seemingly have been successful in providing a better solution for the students and by extension to society.
That's fine up to a point; the majority of businesses still use MS Office and windows and will want to see that experience, and if you completely replace everything with linux or other free alternatives you're just creating another monoculture, and push a free-only view; which is, to my mind, just as bad.
... Microsoft start suing the schools for using Linux without paying the proper license fees...
Bah!
In the US, or at least the school district I teach in there is tremendous resistance to anything that isn't blessed by the Gods of Redmond. I teach with Ubuntu in the classroom and I am forever getting snide remarks about it. They've even asked me not to put the machines on the network for what they claim are security reasons as if they actually don't want any secure machines on the lan or something. I put the machines behind a router and have safely hidden my enclave of FLOSS goodness. The problem I have with homogeneous networks is that the kids I'm teaching now will probably never see one in real life because in real life there is a mix of *nix and Windows out there and they need those integration skills badly. If anyone knows a way to convince lifetime IT employees at a school district of anything please let me know because these guys and gals are stuck in 1997 and they aren't willing to let it go.
load "$",8,1
I have one wish. I wish that the headlines were not about this just being a switch from Windows to Linux, but also that this is a switch for users from PC-driven displays to network-driven displays, aka terminals. Yes, it is that, but for the people who just open up the newspaper and read about this this story and stories like it are framed within the idea that it is about moving from one operating system to another. I wish that the news would be that users don't each need their own PC, that they only need a display that is attached to the network. That would be news - that the users at the school can use software without needing a PC at every desk, or even in the building.
The parent has been unfairly modded as a Troll, because he's right. Network-based PXE reinstallation systems exist and work well (RedHat linux users may be interested in googling for "Cobbler" for example.) However he's also wrong. The best solution is to have ultra-thin clients like Sun Rays. That way there is no expensive gear on student's desks, and everything is run on computers locked safely up in a data center. Plus you'll get session portability and hardware homogenity benefits. You can even run rdesktop or the Sun connector app to connect to Windows Terminal Servers (or, if you have the resources, individual VMware sessions for each user) to grant access to those evil, evil windows applications. Troll me too, moderators.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
I understand my elementary school nephews in Stowe, Vermont are going to be learning on Vista in their school. It's nice they are getting any exposure at all (though they've been playing Harry Potter on a PC at home for years) but I'm worried about what their first experience will be, and also why an OS that most businesses are leery about and which ties up huge computing resources is being used in an elementary school. True I had a fabulous opportunity when I was young to learn on a keypunch terminal and feed Hollerith cards into a job hopper, and I had an early Apple II later.. but I think most households in the U.S. anyway young kids have experience with games (Wii fun, PS2 has too much gore and difficult games, PC has the ones you spend hours on constantly) and not much else. They don't "get" computers but they use them. What kind of lessons are they going to be taught? And will Cancel/Allow train their minds? Will they even learn there is a box to think outside of or will it always be what are they allowed to do? Apparently kids these days are told a lot more about what they are "allowed" to do from what they (my 3 nephews) tell me.
where can I obtain a copy of this glorious server operating system of the future?
You used to have a really crappy sig, but then I stole it.
deep freeze works good in school as all you have to do is reboot the system to undo any changes and then you don't have to lock down the systems as much as you do with other setups.
...
However, perhaps the greatest benefit of switching to free software is that the reliability of the new system frees up technical staff to do more than routine support.
I agree that it takes a fair amount of tracking to quantify total cost of ownership beyond the large but incidental fixed cost of implementation.
Still, staff salaries are usually a significant cost to any operation, so if staff resources are able to shift into new activities as a result of the change, it would seem common sense to begin by tracking that. The article has two sentences side by side. It shouldn't be hard to connect the dots between them.
Moreover, if we're measuring true TCO, we should look at overall effect on staff time, not just tech support staff. In a Linux terminal server environment, the entire staff population will now be spending zero time on fiddling with their workstations. It would be nice to compare this with the number of hours on average that individual staff members previously spent in dealing with issues on Windows workstations. That's a big part of TCO as well, but if you never measure it, how can you know when you've improved it?
I don't know the answer in this case, but I'll make one general observation. When Microsoft promotes its lower TCO calculations, look to see whether they fairly compare the total staff time spent in system configuration, software installation, failures due to bugs, compatibility and security issues, problem analysis and resolution.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
What you probably have is a load of ignorant MCSEs. They have worked through the manuals, they have done the multiple choice tests, but they don't really have a clue outside the point and click. Why am I doing this? I don't know, you just have to. If you don't, security demons come and eat your soul. Or something. The fix for any problem? Upgrade. I guess we can't do that in XP, have to wait for Vista. No, I don't know how to do that in Word, I guess you can't, you have to wait for Office 2007. Meanwhile, I don't have to learn anything new, I can just go home at 5 and kick the kids.
This is the way of the world. As soon as you try to democratise a new technology, the skill levels of the early adopters are diluted because there just are not that many really able people about. And the dilution itself reduces expectations. If all the plumbers you meet are incompetent, you don't expect a competent plumber. And if you yourself know nothing about plumbing, you won't be surprised when the plumber takes five hours to swap out a central heating pump.
In my time I have come across "mechanical engineers" who didn't know you had to supply and remove the energy stored in rotating objects, "electrical engineers" who were capable of using the earth wire to short out a toroidal transformer and not understand why the wire melted, an "industrial chemist" who thought if you diluted an acid spill with plenty of water the sewage company wouldn't notice, an "environmental systems engineer" who thought that it was safe to fill a large plastic tank with a hydrogen/air mixture (he didn't know how the Van der Graaf generator works. It was a _big_ bang). These people were probably the average level of their occupations, and simply were not capable of independent thought. Your IT staff are at that level. As with this school district, you need someone with the support of the management and some real drive to push the thing through, and persuade these people that it's worth learning new skills because they create new opportunities. But they have to be pushed and jollied along, because otherwise they will lapse into sloth. And when they have the new skills - they will plateau again.
Pining for the fjords
Microsoft and Apple, among others, are willing to give stuff to schools. With Linux, the software may be free, but you probably have to buy your own hardware.
It's true, it may be cheaper in the long run, if you're not a highly technical school -- meaning, you don't have to upgrade your hardware very often. But even then, many schools prefer to take the first hit free, and then be stuck with the recurring licencing fees.
Personally, though, schools are the first places I'd want to start on free software, as unlikely as it is. That way, when they graduate, they'll be ready to move their workplace over -- or at least be easily trainable for anything -- and if they go on to be programmers, they'll be more likely to fix the free tools than to buy the commercial ones.
Contrast that to the way it is now, where you only use the proprietary stuff because it's free in school and easy to pirate at home, so when you get to work, you insist that the company buy you the same tools, and the company figures it's cheaper than retraining you.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I live in a mainly rural school district 64 in the same province, and we're starting to undergo a similar process. The local principal is interested, and I've given him a copy of Edubuntu to evaluate the upcoming changes--though I'm not so sure the district is going that direction, I think they're emulating Kamloops (thin client etc.). The comment in the article about the staff having more time for things like a help desk and hardware support is understated, it's absolutely huge in making a difference for teachers, especially at isolated schools. It's important to me, because I want to start a computer club at my kids' (40 student rural) elementary, and I've been giving away old boxes with puppy linux on them for a while now, with some success.
Nice thing about successful changeovers like this is that they're infectious.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I went to high school in this district, and it sounds like they have come along way. The teachers used to be so paranoid about ANYTHING computer related it was ridiculous. I was actually suspended from grade 8 for using the Windows 3.1 built-in "recorder" software that I used to record a 30 second video of the mouse opening programs and closing them, then setting it on repeat just before class was over.
The next student who came in freaked out, called the teacher over, who in turn went ballistic, thinking it was some massive virus taking over the network, he didn't know or even think to press "ESC" to stop the cycle. Next thing I knew I was suspended.
In areas where you have competent IT staff and are willing to do the work yourself, Linux offers great cost savings *and* the ability to have a system tailored exactly to your needs.
This is something that will be repeated because free software is like that and the pioneering days are over.
The beauty of free software is where it can take otherwise mediocre staff. One of the greatest motivators is a chance to make a difference, as proved by GE lighting experiments back in the 1920s. In the non free world, you do your job in a very limited box only to watch your work torn out by the next version in the upgrade train. In the free software world, you have all the tools everyone else does and what you do can stand on it's merit. Eventually, the picture that emerges is that there was nothing wrong with your people other than poor tools.
The very worst case, once most of the work is already done, is that you just use the software like any other non free shop. This still represents an improvement, because free software gives you more for your money.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I have a similar story.
My name is Josh Beck, and I'm the IT coordinator at a magnet middle school within the Northeast Independent School District.(San Antonio, TX) Last year I piloted about 9 classroom Ubuntu computers in my lab. As the year went on, I modified the default setup so that I have an image that is secure and hopefully %100 percent functional. I've spent the last week exporting this image to 5 computer labs, approximately 150 computers. When the teachers and kids come back next year , they'll have the option to boot Windows or Linux. (The Linux side is sporting the fancy Beryl desktop. It won a lot of the kids over last year, and I'm thinking it will do the same next year.)
If you are in Education, and you want to migrate your school's computers so that open-source is at least an option, be warned. There really can be a whole lot of resistance. I have to agree with what I read here in that respect. I really did put my job on the line when I wiped out my first 9 licensed computers to replace them with open-source alternatives. The district-level IT coordinators put up a bit of a fight.
Although I'm in agreement that Novel can easily be phased out, I do use the Linux client. It isn't easy to bring online, and if your primary net device is listed as anything other that 'ETH0' you have to reprogram and recompile the thing, but Novel access through Linux works. Here's a more detailed look if you are interested:
Novel on Linux How To
At this point in time my feeling is that it's probably more realistic to offer teachers and students a choice, and then educate them about what's involved with that choice. If they want to use Windows, and your school district has a healthy tax-base, by all means purchase the license and allow them to do so. I can tell you this. When I offered the choice last year, the Linux seats were hot real estate. The kids love it.
Here's a video with one of my students:
Eject!
Josh Beck
IT Coordinator
Interactive Media Applications at Krueger Middle School
Northeast ISD
San Antonio, Texas
if you completely replace everything with linux or other free alternatives you're just creating another monoculture, and push a free-only view; which is, to my mind, just as bad.
Ignoring the fact that linux and other free laternatives divides your supposed monoculture by two, free software offers choice and modifications non free software will never match. Do you really think BSD, HURD and Linux are the same thing? How can you imagine a monoculture when all three of those choices will run on dozens of different hardware platforms? When you permutate these already dizzying choices by the number of distributions available with procompiled binaries, your monoculture starts to look like an old growth jungle. Compare that to the old i386 binary crap from M$ that loads exactly the same memory footprint on boot regardless of hardware, which looks more like a Soviet apartment block.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
*Yet, although if a time machine were possible, it'd have to be invented in all time periods simultaneously, otherwise what happens when you go back to a time when there were no time machines??
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
Yes, congratulations. However, they are building on years of effort by the Kindergarten to 12th grade Linux project, and other such projects. The K12Linux Project was originally started for the Multnomah County Education Service District, using hardware donated by Intel. (Intel does some of its processor design in a big facility which is also in Portland, Oregon, USA.)
Perhaps 8 years ago, one of the founders of the K12Linux project told me that the total cost of maintenance of Linux was less than half that of Windows. (He gave a figure much less than half, but I don't remember the actual figure.)
My experience with Windows is that it is sloppily coded, and lots of things cause Windows to need maintenance. For example, the CPU hogging bug in Firefox, which seems to be worse in Firefox version 2.0.0.4, sometimes causes Windows XP Professional SP2 to become unstable and require re-starting the computer. When Firefox hogs the CPU under Linux, it is only necessary to kill Firefox. Linux remains stable.
If Microsoft paid schools $100 per copy to take Windows, the cost of Windows would still be far higher than K12Linux.
The K12Linux Project home page gives links to other Linux-in-schools projects, also.
A side benefit of Linux is that it is much more secure, partly because of its design, and partly because students are less likely to know how to tinker with it, I was told.
It is far easier to maintain a terminal server with numerous simple terminals, than separate stand-alone computers, too, and Linux is fast enough to be used that way.
I feel a little uncomfortable with what I said above, because I am vastly understating the savings of using Linux rather than Windows. Microsoft can't even make "Microsoft Genuine Advantage" work correctly; that is a GENUINE disadvantage of Windows. (I am using the word "genuine" in its honest sense, not in its abusive public relations spin sense.)
Another problem with a Windows system is hiring people who are willing to work with products from a company such as Microsoft that is so abusive. It's tiring to work with abusiveness.
Again, I still feel uncomfortable because I am understating the case. My company has had considerable trouble with error messages from Windows Update, for example. We've had about 8 different kinds of problems, some of which have required hours to solve. Judging from the many, many complaints on the newsgroup, there seem to be many other kinds of Windows Update problems we haven't had.
People who work in IT sometimes like Microsoft because the sloppy Microsoft products give them more work.
Yes, it's very advanced, if it finds there is a security exploit in the wild it will just travel back in time before the exploit is known to the general public. The method is known as security through time compression.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
I'm a Network Analyst for a school district in Nor Cal, and having just DUMPED a terminal server type installation, I'll give you my perspective of terminals in a school environment.
1) Terminal Servers suck using presentation software. Two or three people on one machine is enough to bring it to its knees. Adding Servers to the farm is not really a viable option for every three people doing "Powerpoints".
2) Using Web based applications can bring the server to its knees with about 10-15 users. Combine with #1 and you are toast.
3) Teachers want to use whatever software they want to use. Telling them that they can't run X because it is 1) Windows and we're Linux, 2) wasn't designed for Term Servers, 3) will bring the Term Servers to their knees with minimal users, IS NOT AN OPTION to them. They don't care, and will run whining to the site admin, or to the District Office about how unsupportive IT is to teaching etc.
4) Flash/Shockwave Nuff said.
So, we've pulled out the client server environment and replace it with stand alone computers. With modern imaging software and RIS/Windows Deployment Services I don't care if Little Johnny Rotten has just installed malware, I just re-image the machine and it is only down for less than 1/2 hour, and comes back fully patched and ready do go.
No longer am I required to spend countless hours trying to defend why some piece of software doesn't run right, and won't be supported. Nor am I spending weeks trying to figure out a work around for application X that doesn't work right on Term Servers. Now I tell them to install whatever they want, they are responsible, and if it fubars the computer it will be reset. I can reset 40 / 50 computers a day if necissary, and it is mostly brain dead work.
Which frees me to be more productive with my time. It is much better for IT when a Network Analyst can help teachers with technology rather than being a stumbling block of "not possible", "no", "we can't". It is all fine and good to try Term Services with the latest Linux distro, but in the long run, it wasn't feasible considering the requirements/desires of the Teaching staff.
I wish them well, and hope they have better luck than I did. I just know that Terminal Servers didn't work for us.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Here was the most tragic line in the piece for me
secondary schools in British Columbia are supposed to teach skills rather than specific software, in practice, many teachers had developed courses that specified particular pieces of software. "You get a teacher who's been around 20-30 years, and they're not that keen on developing their course again," Ferrie says in wry hindsight. Also, many schools had already paid for textbooks that referred to specific proprietary software.
The teacher is absolutely right in this assertion: students should be learning about concepts and ideas - not only about examples and instances. It's fine if an algebra student can derive the quadratic formula from rote memorization; but it is far more important that she develops the skills to think critically on how to attack this problem on her own.
In the best computer science programs and programming books; you walk away with a deeper understanding of the science behind the code. Learning should be focused on cultivating concepts and ideas that can be applied to a broad range of implementations; not churning out specifically Java or C# developers. Similarly, children should learn about core computer concepts and ideas - not on how to create flashing text in Microsoft Word.
I am a level one tech support volunteer who has gotten some assistance building a 33-seat thin client network in a public school in San Francisco. We could use the help of a one or two higher-level network admins on a few issues. We have been up and running nicely for two years. We could just use some help occasionally. It's a public school, so there is almost no budget. We are doing almost all of this on legacy hardware. If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, and would like to help with a few issues, please email me at einfeldt at digitaltippingpoint dot com. Thanks either way! Christian Einfeldt
I've done a lot of work with schools, and mostly in NetWare systems. While I saved them a bunch of $$$ over using Windows, not much is cheaper than free...
And I looked at the LTSP back in 2003 thought it was so not ready. Two systems asked me if it was something they should consider, and I told they yes, but 1)let it mature a little technically, and 2)find an advocate in the system, even *just* a teacher, who would drive the project. I knew this would cut my consulting fees dramatically, but I thought then it was inevitable.
Unfortunately, this was in Maine, and the MLTI (Apple iBooks for 7th and 8th grades) pretty much slammed the door shut on open source. Apple declared 'other' software completely unacceptable, though we got several NetWare systems talking to the Apple systems quite nicely, thank you very much. Microsoft, of course, straddled the fence. Linux systems were actively fought against by the Apple engineers, being the only true threat to their business.
I'm hoping that the LTSP catches hold. It has tremendous potential for schools, and frankly for most any application where there is a limited number of applications necessary. And maybe more than that...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
"Or you could say, just kill the process in Windows."
Yes, and after killing the Firefox CPU hogging process, the ENTIRE OS is unstable.
The founders of the K12Linux project were the kind of people who will always have work. They enjoyed reducing the workload as much as possible. A lot of the discussion of Windows comes from people who wouldn't have a job if Windows weren't so difficult to maintain.
The professional usage nazi in me hates the submitter for calling these systems "terminals". A "terminal" is just a brainless box that passes data back and forth, without the ability to actually run applications locally. A diskless system that boots off a server is a thin client, which is actually a lot more impressive. What's ironic is that you see lots of systems such as the Sun Ray that are sold as "thin clients", but are actually just terminals!
But my inner usage nazi needs to get over it. This usage is lame, but too well established to go away. Time to move on.
Sounds a lot like what the ndiyo project ( http://www.ndiyo.org/ ) is trying to do, except they are also working on providing their own ( sub 100$ ) hardware to go along with the concept.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
FWIW..I spent the last 3 years working as the (only full time) IT admin/tech for a K-12 school district. (approx 5 schools,.. total when I left of about 700 workstations.) What they did right (in the article) was (seemingly) they had good management who understood what they were doing and put an organized effort into re-training the staff and valuing the "soft" side of the equation (human factors) as much as the technical side. (Although I would also like to see specifications on exactly how many systems they migrated, and what distros they used) From my experience, having spent the last 3 years in a K-12 IT position.. I'm of the opinion that success stories like this are (and will continue to be) few and far between. School districts are full of politics and "resistance" and very little money. (as shown by the fact that this "project" took them 10 years to implement) In all the school districts I've been in (and worked in) the employees, staff and students didnt care whether it was FOSS or Windows or Mac or whatever. All they cared about was that it worked reliably. If you took the time to care about their issues, AND you were skilled enough to make it work.. then you were a hero. I'm an advocate for having as much variety as possible ( In the high school library lab I built, I wanted to include several Ubuntu machines and some Macs.. but the school had standardized on HP/Compaq and XP... so it didnt happen.
Nice to see that. Better have the money going to local business than licensing fees that go outside the country.
...etc., and disks are cheap anyway).
/etc/nsswitch.conf to give precedence to NIS over local files). /etc/fstab has the NFS shares and what they map to.
I did something similar for the home network.
Completely diskless PCs are less practical in a home environment (need to source the cards, the Boot ROMs,
For the home network, I don't want to chase viruses and malware. So except for one dual boot machine, everything is Linux (5 workstations, and one server).
A server at home stores all the user data. NFS handles file sharing, and NIS handles authentication (do not forget to configure
All this is on on kubuntu for the workstations and ubuntu server on the server. I think I started doing this with Dapper, and moved on to Breezy, Edgy then now it is on Feisty.
For general computing, kubuntu is very usable. OpenOffice, FireFox and Gaim/Kopete for the basics. Skype works well, and so does Opera.
I used to have autofs too so all home directories were mounted automatically from the server, but stopped doing that several months ago. I can't remember what it was, but it was an upgrade that caused some issues (maybe around Edgy).
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
MOD UP
Was that mentioned in the article?
Msft's legal threats are just FUD. If msft sued, there would be counter suits, and msft would almost certainly lose. Take a look at msft's history over the last ten years, msft settles lawsuits all the time.
Msft does not want a lawsuit because that would bring out the dirty landry. Maybe msft could pay scox to sue them, but I doubt that would get far.
These are EXACTLY the types of articles that need to be written and submitted to major IT magazines. Non-biased success stories that don't hide the difficulties or how they were surmounted.
Less "RA RA Yea LINUX" and more "down to biz" stories with real meat are what we need.
We had twice as many seats installed this way as we could have afforded with that other OS and almost nothing to do for maintenance except backup and watching it hum.
What those who compare LTSP and such with dumb terminals of 20 years ago is that Moore's Law had dragged the CPU, RAM, networking and motherboards into the 21st century. A modern CPU is idling on most desktops (80%) and RAM is cheap and plentiful on 64bit servers. LTSP is a compromise only for full screen video and heavy number crunching. Even then, a power user gets a slice of monstrous power on a multi-CPU Optern server loaded with RAM instead of a typical desktop. The school's load is almost ideal for LTSP except if you teach multimedia production in a lab. Those 20% of users who need it can still have a Linux thick client but that solution is unnecessarily costly for every seat.
A similar technology that multiplies benefit/cost is the multi-seat X client. You can hand 6 to 12 users on one PC using single or dual head video cards and multiple keyboards and mice. Groovix and Userful are two implementations. Groovix is open source.
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
you know how i knew you were gay?
i saw you working on a linux station.
I am the IT Department at a small company. We have employees who require access to computers on a semi-regular basis for checking email, looking at web pages for suppliers and doing simple spreadsheets. I am also lucky to work directly for the company's owner who is a huge advocate of appropriate technology.
Several employees use windows PCs for specific tasks such as scanning office documents or graphics work. Most other employees need very little power on the desktop.
Several years ago we switched a dozen employees to diskless thin clients. They boot using the NIC and get the OS from a linux server. I got all the documentation and instructions on setup from the Linux Terminal Server Project (ltsp.org). We build diskless thin clients for about $200 each (case, power supply, motherboard w/ NIC, and memory)
I have never done a rigorous cost analysis of the benefits of this set up. All I know is I have a dozen employees, who required hardly any training, using linux PCs, who average less than five minutes of support *total* per day. Usually much less.
I've relocated to Arizona, and am not interested in admin work right now unless it pays stupid $. But the resources are there. Just overprice your work by 200% and still lose money on the job. It's a lot to do. Or do it gratis for the reference.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I worked at a computer repair shop. The main tech and I could both handle Windows and Linux. The other guy would only say "Linux sucks. It actually works, so I can't get paid to fix it." I guess he never heard about Linux+ & LPIC certifications getting you money or about Unix sysadmins being paid more than Windows sysadmins (less common skill, get paid more).
look! it's a bird, it's a plane, it's....a girl? yes, a girl browsing Slashdot on Linux
Xen is one of several virtualization technologies available for running Linux and Windows systems (others include VMWare, Qemu, KVM (kernel virtual machines), UML, and Parallels). Xen's primary benefit is the ability to run as a "hypervisor", such that the guest OS instances are "paravirtualized". While this requires a modified OS kernel, the performance overhead is very small (2-4%). Disclaimer: I worked for XenSource running performance benchmarking tests 2005-2006.
The other mode for running Xen guests, with qualifying "VT" hardware from Intel or AMD, is called "full virtualization", and uses on-chip support to allow running virtualized OSs with an unmodified kernel. The benefit is easier virtualization of more operating systems, the downside is a greater performance hit than paravirtualization. Exactly how much I can't say as I wasn't part of this testing, but it seems to be roughly the 30% or so you'd see with VMWare.
There are other downsides of virtualization, particularly concerning high-speed video and audio, though these are being addressed. The primary market is in server farms where workloads can be allocated and dynamically adjusted among physical resources, but it's still something you might keep in mind.
Karsten M. Self
From the article's initial post here:
"Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge."
Is this the truth? This is all I wish to know. Thanks. Because that tells me worlds about this website if it is, and it's "anti-Microsoft/anti-Windows" bent...
public schools do nothing but breed statists,
Funny, because by saying that "x is nothing but y," you are being a statist. No wonder you post anonymously.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
After all, if you save $100,000 a year for the school, certainly they can afford to give you at least a $50,000/year raise, right? Keep in mind, also -- while the system is likely to need a LOT less maintenance, they will need you when it does, rather than just grabbing some random MSCE-tard off the street.
My own view is that this is 50% sheer inertia, and 50% financial bullshit, just like at the individual level. At the individual level, the "financial bullshit" is that it actually, in theory, costs Dell less to pre-install Windows than to pre-install Linux, because, all other concerns aside (including support), they can load crapware on Windows to offset the cost.
At the school level, Microsoft can easily throw around TCO numbers, and a tidy "discount" here and there, and make Windows look like an attractive alternative -- and maybe have it actually be that attractive alternative, for the first year or so. I bet Apple can do the same.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Although its been quite some time since I was a student at the local highschool, I am so glad they have come so far! around 20 years ago they started with a room of clone pc's hooked up via arcnet and to a single novell network. They let the students run it because no one in the district (at that time) supported it .... I was lucky enough to be one of those student.s It was great but a bit chaotic but I had a lot of fun using novell.. even playing around with lanassist (I loved rebooting peoples machines and gettin em in trouble;) ... and damn I loved snipes! I'm sure its got to hold some records for advanced multiplayer support... (at least I dont know of many games ahead of that that can be played specifically on a LAN)
What sucked back then is if something broke you had to wait for a technician to come fix it and they were usually slow and didn't seem to know much ... I think they were more people used to fixing adding machines and photocopiers, and shook there head when It came to stone age networking ... since we only had to call them for hardware problems tho, it was fine (I could figure out anything else) ..
My Last year tho at school they decided not to allow students "supervisor" access to the network and therefore I kinda decided to rebel a bit, and they really laxed in security, cause rather than using novells menu system they decided to use directaccess and they set the privelages as rw but no delete, but any idiot would realize you could just copy a file over the menu file and voilla it was down! .. heh
The other funny thing is they bought cheap clones and because a few of them broke down they bitched at the supplier and some stupid person vowed never to use clone equipment ever again, and from then on had to buy IBM only ... now that rule is gone but they still buy SEANIX computers which IMO are the worst computers built in canada (unless things have changed drastically) ...
I am glad to see tho that they have gone to linux, and I really think the thin approach is a great one!
Managing and supporting systems is predictable, the costs are entirely predictable, you can calculate them with a high degree of accuracy in advance given an particular network architecture. However everyone thinks they are unique and special and know why X or Y can't work and why Z is better. This is currently why I.T. is not a profession but a trade, and the use of the word engineer wrt anything I.T. related is utterly laughable.
Basically, high TCO is a sign of incompetence. Windows or Linux.
Deleted
From the article's initial post here:
"Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by SourceForge."
Is this the truth? This is all I wish to know. Thanks. Because that tells me worlds about this website if it is, and it's "anti-Microsoft/anti-Windows" bent... explains a great deal if it is true.
MOD UP.
... are OK in bad Westerns, they should not be close to administering a computer, let alone a datacenter,
"Stupid burecaucracy" very often is ther for a reason, most likely a legal one. Ignore it at your peril.
But no of course, we are geeks and we can do as we please because we have a root account. That makes us cleverer and more insightful than any bureaucrat out there.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Privacy, security?
What is going to happen when a teenager, bound to be uninformed about many consequences of their actions, commits a big mistake?
Let the youngsters' creativity manifest in other fashion. Providing free or cheap labour should not be that avanue.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
http://www.nclinux.net/cgi-bin/webgenie.cgi?button =78">The North Central Linux Symposium
A dedicated cadre of educational LTSP users, affiliated with K12LTSP, will be gathering Thursday 06/14 and Friday 06/15 to demo and discuss. If you are an educational IT type and live anywhere near Minneapolis, you should come! See link above for info.
You said, "... I have never ever seen the behaviour you have described, except..."
You said, "Sorry, but this is just pure anti-Windows BS."
A) You are not sorry.
B) Your statements are quite arrogant, since you are saying that if you have never seen a problem, it doesn't exist.
C) Follow the links: Firefox development sometimes resembles playing. There are numerous links, leading back to several years ago. I suppose you have never joined the discussions of Firefox instability.
D) Basically, this seems to be the story. Winifred Mitchell Baker, the CEO of Mozilla, is a socially uncomfortable lawyer who became CEO when no one thought there was an opportunity. Now Mozilla Foundation is making millions from designating Google as the default search engine.
Winifred has insufficient control over those who work for her, because she doesn't understand what they do. The Firefox CPU hogging and memory gobbling bug would take some serious troubleshooting to find, and no one wants to do the work, apparently.
The bug in Firefox is apparently caused by inadequate allocation of resources. Apparently there is a bug in Windows, or more than one, that causes the entire Microsoft Windows OS to become unstable when Firefox starts CPU hogging.
In any case, the only way to get Windows back to a stable state after killing Firefox is to re-start the computer.
The Firefox CPU hogging bug occurs only during heavy use of Firefox, with many Windows and tabs open for several hours, such as happens when someone in purchasing in a corporate environment is researching computer parts. The problem is made worse if the computer is hibernated or put in standby.
Thanks for the suggestion;
"Hmm, You should make a BartPE disc. I have used that on numerous occasions to fix hosed systems."
However, I am again hosed by one of the things I am missing in the requirements to do a recovery. From the BartPE site;
Requirements to build:
The files from your Windows Installation CD-Rom.
Supported Windows versions are:
Windows XP Home Edition (must be slip streamed with Service Pack 1 or higher)
Windows XP Professional (must be slip streamed with Service Pack 1 or higher)
Windows Server 2003, Web Edition
Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition
Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition
PE Builder runs on Windows 2000/XP/2003/BartPE systems.
CD/DVD writer if you want to creat a bootable CD/DVD.
I have neither a Windows 2000 or Windows XP installation disk. I wiped my laptop from Win 2K because I bought it used and it was missing an install disk. Checking the repair manual, It never shipped with one, but had a disk re-image disk. My wife's XP machine also lacks an install disk, but does have a disk re-image disk. The lack of an install disk for Windows is the main reason for my failure to recover the laptop.
"However, three cheers for converting someone to Linux!"
I have to hand one of the cheers to the kind folks in Redmond who made recovery impossible by letting system manufactures ship stuff without an install CD as an anti-piracy measure. I have to hand the second cheer to the OSS community for providing a great OS to install. After failure in the recovery attempts, it was trash it/replace it, or convert it. Thanks for the third cheer.
The truth shall set you free!
Dover Area School District is in York County, Pennsylvania.
Wow.
Silly me, I've been coding with text editors, version control, and Makefiles for over 20 years now, and I cannot stand "environments" like Visual Studio.
It takes all kinds, I guess...
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
RedHat (which we are moving away from), and Debian
In regards to tech training. Students are not active (in a tech role) at working on systems, nor would it be a good idea for them to be. Among other things, there are required admin passwords and other important things that a student should not have access to. Do you really want the temptation of a root password available to students when grades and privacy issues are involved? Nor would it be a good idea for long-term support. Students move on (college, etc), or move away, which would mean that there would be a constant changeover between experienced and inexperience help. Assuming that there would be a constant supply of "expert" students is a far reach, and even if you get an expert there's still a curve in learning the eccentricities and fine details of a particular system.
Moving back to loss of productivity, school districts - while not needing to make a profit - still require a certain degree of productivity. Moreover, when you're riding the edge of technology and more important systems more to a tech platform, keeping stuff running becomes more important. When everything from attendance and marks to faxes and phones is done on or moving to an IT platform, you'd better believe that downtime becomes a major issue. You want experienced help in this, and some buck-saving measures ultimately end up costing money.
Swarm! Swarm!
Just like Munich, there is a whole lot of influential people who have drank the Lunix cool-aid, and are willing to spend whatever it takes to keep their new clunky jury-rigged system going. Woohoo!!! High priced, under skilled Lunix consultants LIVE for this kind of situation!
A few of you with the right stuff will be able to buy very large houses and very fast sports cars just with the proceeds from this one school district.
"Free" software FTW!!
In order to get any real use out of a thin client besides web browsing you must connect to a Terminal Server. Yes it will run IE locally. Yes it will run MS RDP Client locally but thats it! You have to boot up the thin client and then start up and login into the Terminal Server to do any real work. At least when you plug in a SunRay you get the one and only login screen you need. When you login all your apps are there.
I have both a Sun Workstation and SunRay client on my desk. When they're running you can't really tell them apart. This is not the case with a Thin Client. With MS Thin Clients there is always a certain bit of sluggishness there.
Another advantage is the SunRay's being a true "Terminal" you can manage the terminals from the server. With the thin clients there is no real management of the clients only a connection to the server.
Personally I get tired of the PR Department coming up with an new buzz word to make something old sound new and exciting and smarter. A terminal is a terminal either dumb or kinda smart. A workstation is a workstation. A server is a server. A Network Appliance is a toaster.
I've had to kill and restart Firefox probably a half-dozen times in the two months since I last logged onto my Windows PC at the office. It hasn't forced me to restart yet.
Firefox has always been buggy in Windows. Remember the apostrophe bug? So far as I ever saw, that never happened in Linux. Whether it's malicious anti-MS "features" or genuine bugs I won't speculate. But we should hardly be pointing the finger at MS because a third-party app is poorly written and can make Windows unstable.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
Thanks for your Info! These are diskless "PXE boot" stations. In the first years we used the inherited hardware with boot floppies.
.... seemed to be pegged at 95%". I guess it is a sign that it is working well, but I still like input on the weak spots for the next build.
Last year we built a server for two more classrooms of 20 each.
For the processor we just had an Athlon 3200+
4 gigs of ram
200 gig SATA drive
Gigabit Ethernet
I build the servers, but I don't run them. So while I am regularly pushing the administrator for feedback and usage statistics, I hear the not too helpful "ya, it seems to be running well", a lot more than "we were using GIMP and
I know we could use a dual core like your server has(we will drop one in to the athlon 64 Server this year), and even though we have a lot more ram per student than you, Linux seems to use it all, though it is often just for dish cache I believe.
I don't know if the network ever saturates, but to try to keep that from happening we have started implementing Switches that are Gigabit to the server and 10/100 to the terminals.
I don't think we have ever had more than 80 Gigs used on a drive, but we don't have more than 40 stations on a server currently.
For the new server I had wanted to go with a Dual socket server board, but looking at them they seemed to all require registered ECC ram and that is sure not cheap or fast. (I thought having two dual core processors might allow us to consolidate some of the old servers)
If I go with a dual core Athlon 64 I can populate it with 8 gigs ( regular 2 Gig sticks are so cheap now) but I don't have ECC or an extra socket.
I have also been wondering about RAID vs a WD raptor vs More RAM for disk cache.
I would lean toward more RAM, but I have a problem in that I cannot seem to fit more than 8 gigs on a reasonably priced board with reasonably priced RAM.
"Since the switchover", Gregg Ferrie, manager of information technology for the district said, "requests have gone from almost Nothing to a regular occurrence". "Sometimes we can barely keep up with the requests," he continues. "This was something we weren't expecting".
It's not like there weren't early signs of trouble though. The IT Staff revolt was so severe at one point, The district paid $25,000 Canadian to bring in a trainer for two weeks -- just to prevent massive resignations in the department, and slow down the union grievances. The effect that the change from Windows to Linux would have on the people was underestimated. Senior manager Gregg Ferrie, looks back on the problems of the switchover: "We were dealing with people, not machines," he said, "and one lesson I learned is that people are still the biggest component, and you've got to engage them. In all fairness, we were asking them to do a lot."
Just one recent step in the switchover cost the small school district more than $45,000, and that's money that the district can ill afford. "Every penny counts", said Ferrie.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
I'm guessing, but I guess you are right. The LTSP project came first. I was confused.
My interest was in making sure the origins were mentioned.
a) you're right
everything else - huh? you started this by boldly making claims about Firefox as if they were globally applicable - I was merely pointing out that they're not, just so at least there was a single counter-point which proved your claims wrong
Way to act out anger: Find a way to give an incorrect interpretation to something someone else said.