For a wonderful Palm app that already does this exact thing, check out http://www.mapopolis.com. Relatively small maps (from NavTech I think) and an app that works with a GPS to plot your place on the map, move the map, and can plot directions between endpoints. Just used it last week with a bluetooth gps unit in new york city - it saved me several times as I would make wrong turns and could figure out how to get back on course.
You should be use a few FireWire hard drives, with 10.2.6 installed on them. Boot the machine, and either use a program like NetRestore to erase/restore a disk image of a Master 10.2 install onto the drive or roll your own shell script to do the same. The advantage to FireWire is that it is really fast, copying about 1 GB per minute from a 4200 rpm drive. Also, when you are doing 10 or 15 machines at the same time, you don't have to worry about the network bogging down (or your server!). The man page has some excellent information on this, simply "man asr" in the terminal.
Also, if you are putting OS X 10.2 on older machines you probably have to upgrade the firmware first. Someone already has to walk to the location to reboot the machine and probably make sure that a teacher didn't copy their grades to the Hard Drive (that you will be erasing in a minute). Also, once you get the image restored onto the machine, there are a few preferences that are set on a "ByHost" basis - tied to the MAC address of the machine. Things like energy saver settings, and Remore Desktop being enabled. The latter is important if you want to be able to manage your machines later on without walking across the campus.
You should contact Apple and connect with a System Engineer who can work with you to make your deployment a whole lot smoother. Moving over several hundred machines to a new OS is no small task, but a little automation can go a long ways toward making it a manageable process.
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For a wonderful Palm app that already does this exact thing, check out http://www.mapopolis.com. Relatively small maps (from NavTech I think) and an app that works with a GPS to plot your place on the map, move the map, and can plot directions between endpoints. Just used it last week with a bluetooth gps unit in new york city - it saved me several times as I would make wrong turns and could figure out how to get back on course.
You should be use a few FireWire hard drives, with 10.2.6 installed on them. Boot the machine, and either use a program like NetRestore to erase/restore a disk image of a Master 10.2 install onto the drive or roll your own shell script to do the same. The advantage to FireWire is that it is really fast, copying about 1 GB per minute from a 4200 rpm drive. Also, when you are doing 10 or 15 machines at the same time, you don't have to worry about the network bogging down (or your server!). The man page has some excellent information on this, simply "man asr" in the terminal.
Also, if you are putting OS X 10.2 on older machines you probably have to upgrade the firmware first. Someone already has to walk to the location to reboot the machine and probably make sure that a teacher didn't copy their grades to the Hard Drive (that you will be erasing in a minute). Also, once you get the image restored onto the machine, there are a few preferences that are set on a "ByHost" basis - tied to the MAC address of the machine. Things like energy saver settings, and Remore Desktop being enabled. The latter is important if you want to be able to manage your machines later on without walking across the campus.
You should contact Apple and connect with a System Engineer who can work with you to make your deployment a whole lot smoother. Moving over several hundred machines to a new OS is no small task, but a little automation can go a long ways toward making it a manageable process.