Slashdot Mirror
School Expels PCs, Installs NCs
mirthy wrote in with this CNN story about a school in NYC that dumped individual PCs in favor of a Sun-run server/client network, and how they're oh-so-happy with their new system. And, Mirthy notes in passing, "CNN seems to be getting the 'tech beat' much better than other organizations (with articles on sendmail and now this)!" Yeah, they've been getting better lately. Kudos!
A couple of jobs ago (don't ya love this industry?) I worked as senior network/unix dude for a medium sized university. I would've KILLED for something like this. In fact, I setup something not so very different, but at a much higher cost.
/incredible/ performance, and incredible reliability. I had no downtime, ever (except once caused by a cracker -- but I squished him). This setup supported about 100 simultaneous users comfortably. For the educational market, it was wonderful.
.edu setting tends to be that very few of the mainline "solutions providers" understand the market. There is one critical fact in this market that stands out: Students cannot be trusted. Students are not impacted when the machines go down, they are young and often irresponsible, and the best and brightest often cause the most trouble because they try things that shouldn't be tried (legitimately trying to learn). In a UNIX/Terminal environment, I can lock them down enough that they can't impact reliability for everyone else, but leave them open enough that the students can still see how the system works.
What I did was I bought X-terminals from HDS and backended them all on a Sun UE5000. The upshot was that I got
The problem in the
The other problem is that almost all machines are shared by almost all the users. Repeat after me: POP based email is a disaster because it downloads (by default) all the student's email to a public pc. Another persistent problem (especially on windoze) is that students load software on the PC's, change the settings, fill the browser caches with pornography, etc. etc. All this might not matter on their personal PC, but on a public PC in a computer lab is horrible.
Bluntly, if this system had been available 3 or 4 years ago, I would have probably bought a gross.
Oh yeah, don't forget the administrative costs!!! I've heard a couple of people grumbling about the cost of Sun servers. The fact is that Sun servers are a lot cheaper than the horde of administrators you have to hire to manage a couple of hundred PC's that are constantly being trashed by 3l33t h4x0rs. Bluntly, a competent PC TECH (forget networking admin, just a pc tech) is going to cost you $30K/yr time you pay benefits. It doesn't take long to buy a UE4500 at that price.
-- Slashdot sucks.
It's interesting to see (from the perspective of a dual computer science/economics major) how increased competition has caused Sun to get off its high horse. Back in the heydey of commercial Unix, the early 90's, it was considered rather declasse to pursue school districts as a viable market for computer sales. Most schools were lucky to get DOS, and people snickered at Apple and NeXT for even considering the idea.
:)
Now all the major vendors are going after schools. Microsoft is doing it in their typical monopolistic style, and Sun is doing it in its own holier-than-thou-technology style, but the fact is the competition caused by Linux (I'll get to that in the next paragraph!) has made the major vendors scramble to make computing a 'push market' again.
A lot of Slashdotters and Linux zealots treat Linux as if it were a competitor to major vendors. Those same people get confused when they say, "I don't get it: IBM is making so much off of AIX, why is it interested in Linux? Sun is making so much money off of Solaris? Why is it interested in Linux? Etc." And the ESRite zealots come out and say "Because they are hardware vendors, and Free Software is our salvation because it lowers operating costs for them and makes the consumer happy."
Well, if I may posit so boldly, maybe Linux isn't a competitor as it is an advance in technology. And from a big-iron vendor like Sun, it's foolish to ignore an increase in Technology. All of a sudden, Linux is the way to secure the low-end server market, with increasing chances of the low-end desktop market. Of course, proprietary products like Tru64/AIX/Solaris/VMS/MVS/UNICOS handle the high-end server market. This leaves the vendors free to handle the NC market.
A lot of people pooh-poohed the NC idea, saying "It will go nowhere, PC users like powerful computers," or "NC will go nowhere except in niche markets." What a few people don't know is that there is no such thing as a Bad idea in business -- there are only better ideas. And since Linux is GPL, and available to everyone, the low-end server/desktop market has been leveled for the time being. Now that the challenge of the 90's has been rendered non-time-critical (in the face of a crumbling-reputation Microsoft and free-software R&D miracles), everyone is free to pursue NC pipe dreams.
I've always thought NCs are wonderful for schools because the main problems of NC usage (namely bandwidth) are not issues -- Schools are for the most part closed entities and outside traffic is usually kept to a minimum. In K-12 anyway.
Personally I think that networked computing is going to help improve computing technology. With less to worry about with respect to i/o overhead, people can make tighter code. It's no coincidence that Windows CE is the most reliable of all the Windows programs. It's essentially the (theoretically very effective) NT/VMS core without any of the win32 cruft. Granted, the Sun Ray is little more than a dumb terminal, but as quick operation of tasks (over a network or otherwise) becomes more important, we need to get rid of cruft like Win32 and other higher level APIs. NC's provide us with a good excuse to
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
Right now there's something like this being done at the Corbett school in Tucson Arizona. The link won't show you much other than some drawing by the students, but there's a short description in an email. It's a work in progress, done mostly by volunteers.
Really, it all comes down to making a bunch of cheap X terminals and some application servers. The X terminals can be much cheaper than $400 (refurbished 486's work well enough). Though they are hard to maintain, it's even possible with donated equipment (which, while plentiful for schools, tends to be otherwise useless). There has been a lot of discussion about this on the SEUL-edu mailing list (interested people are invited to join).
Maintenance issues as a whole are very important in schools, with public labs, occasionally malicious users, and a lack of knowlegable admins. The lack of security on Windows and Macs make them totally inappropriate for classroom use, but somehow most schools don't seem to appreciate this. As a result, school computers tend to be finicky and inflexible, and take up as much time doing dumb technical stuff as they do helping children learn.
The alternative is the laptop schools, which is to me a Very Bad Idea. But at least the computers trully are personal -- and if the kid messes up their computer, they've messed up their computer. But there's so many minuses to laptops...
Of course the Riverdale school has been using Linux for a long time on the server side, but recently there's been a lot more activity on the client side as well. I think Linux can do most of what most schools want to do right now, which doesn't make it perfect at all, but perfection is not a serious option to many schools -- or even half-way decent (I'm sorry to say).
Learnux is a Canadian volunteer effort to recycle old computers into useful Linux computers.
MIPS are about the least scarce thing I can think of for a network administrator at a facility like the one described in the article. (Disk space is a close second.) Every new PC has enough MIPS to choke a horse, way more than is required by the applications people want to run. And yet the average school or university computer lab is a mess due to unauthorized changes made to the systems by users, and differences between different generations of systems.
A more centralized computing environment is about delivering consistent, uniform, controlled, reliable user services. Very few people need more MIPS, but everyone except a bithead needs a consistent experience from all systems, with upgrades also happening system-wide. A centralized server delivers on these requirements. Users won't miss the MIPS.
Anyone else here remember the days when many schools were on novell networks during the push for centralized software. Not a fun sight, its really sad to see all this happening again. I'll admit centralized management is nice, but its no so nice when the entire school can get no work done just because the server crashed. And yes, servers still do crash. All too frequently servers crash and people cannot access the internet and or email. But atleast they could type up a document in a wordprocessor, or finish up thier programming assignment. Fun game to play, if your ever in an office park and you see what looks to you like way too many secretaries outside eating/smoking or whatever. Walk up to one and say "So? the network is down hu?"
If the kid loses his card, he ceases to exist. Other kids will walk by him or her, acting as if he or she were not there. The glances of others will seem to shift and focus on objects beyond the individual, never making any contact, as though the individual were invisible.
This thing is coming more and more in the news... I was lucky enough to see the demo some time back.
It's really sweet: absolutely quiet... you could put 100s together and still have pindrop silence (there is no fan to cool off the cpu essentially).
Two modes of login are supported: the first looks like the normal solaris login, and probably works like logging in from an XTerm (or fakes this; see later)
The other is much more interesting. It uses a JavaCard. Essentially, you insert a JavaCard in an usused terminal slot, and you get back your workspace... when you're done, just remove the card, and your workspace flashes out, and the login screen reappears.
It's very neat, in the demo, they started an MP3 player, and when the song was midway, removed the card. Almost instantaneously, the login screen was up. She went up to another station, inserted the card, and the MP3 started playing from where it had been stopped!!
There were some graphical demos too... but that imho depends on the network bandwidth and how fast the server is, since all the processing is being done there.
I guess they are checkpointing various kinds of state for each user on the server... *very* server intensive, but a single point of administration (and failure!) is the plus (minus!) point, i guess...
amit
If this were a Linux or FreeBSD story, everyone would be jumping all over it saying that it was the greatest thing they'd ever heard of. But because it's Sun pushing a technology paradigm that's been around for ages, and apparently doing so effectively in ways that really count, many people seem down on it.
What's up with that? We all have our biases, and we all like to make our voices be heard when injustices are being done in the industry, but this doesn't strike me as being something anyone should be putting Sun down for. Is the hardware and software working for this school in NYC? Sounds like it. Who are any of us to rant and rave about any company that is trying to put
quality hardware & software to work in our schools. Consider this at least, it's not Microsoft.
-phillip
I think Sun may have found a good niche for thin clients outside business, and more power to them.
The schools get hardware that is cheaper and better than an NT network. In addition it's simpler to administer and it grants them more control over students, they'll love that part.
So as long as we don't forget the people who all this is supposedly in benefit of, the students, it sounds great. I have some points in that regard.
This should not be taken as an opportunity to impose product marketing on on a captive audience, whether we're talking about soft drinks or operating systems. OS and program sign-on splashes, ok, but lets not get ridiculous.
I also wouldn't like to see this used as an attack on diversity by Sun. That is, this tends to bind everyone to the editor, languages, and tools that Sun decides to provide with the server. No problem with that, as long as it is possible to add more diverse third party programs at the school's discretion, without talk of voiding licenses or warranties.
This is likely to leave students with practically zero privacy. Other students may crack the server, and the administration reads what they please of course. This is not a problem if the students and their parents are explicitly warned that all school computer data is public ahead of time. Terrible precedent, but otherwise you have to implement real security, and teach adminstrators to respect student privacy, and I can't see it happening this lifetime. Good practice for work it seems anyway.
If done right, this could be very good for students, schools, and Sun. Hope it is.
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That's where all these business plans seem to be heading. MS (already there), Sun (NCs), AOL, WebTV, Linux (slowly but steadily). I wonder how many of these will be aimed/are aimed at lower income families, the 50% of this country(US) that doesn't already have a PC? Maybe we'll see some real competition...
+&x
I hope nobody goes bad-mouthing these thin-clients before thinking about how much time and energy it saves people in the schools.
When I was in high school I helped manage the computer lab, and I'd have to say that some sort of network computing system would be a godsend compared to what I had to deal with.
I went to a small private school which didn't really have a lot of money to throw around for technology. Half the room was Mac G3's, and the other half was Mac 6100/60 PPCs, since they couldn't afford to upgrade all of the old 6100's to G3s all at once. Having two totally different systems means we have to have older versions of software on half the lab since the older machines couldn't handle it.
Then of course there is the problem of "terrorism." We had very minimal problems with this in previous years, but last year (my last year there) the problem exploded. At the very least, people would come in, download games off the web, and just clog the hard drives up with garbage. One person even went so far as to make two or three nested folders inside the Extensions folder of one of our Macs to hide half a gigabyte worth of games. And on the other end of the spectrum, there's the people who drag the System file out of the System Folder, reboot the machine, and walk away, leaving us to come back and boot the machine off a CD to fix it.
After about a month and a half of this we frantically purchased Foolproof and locked down all the systems, but that only caused more problems, since a lot of programs actually didn't cooperate with Foolproof.
The sad thing is that the only things they use those computers for are classes in intro. Java, C++, web page editing, and word processing, all of which are nicely covered by Linux. I never missed an opportunity to say that if we set up an NIS/NFS server and used Linux that would be the end of all the problems, but it never really took hold.
The Sun Rays probably would have been great. People could have done development work and ran StarOffice or something like that, and admin'ing the whole system would have been a whole lot easier. Plus, compared to Mac hardware, which is prevalent in K-12, they're dirt cheap. For the price of one iMac, they can buy three thin clients. Seems to work out better for everyone.
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