Greetings!

["Simón A. Ruiz"]

Simón A. Ruiz wrote:
> Jonathan D. Proulx wrote:
>> $DIETY bless you!
> 
> *lol* I quite enjoyed that.
> 
>> That's quite an impressive setup you have ther,e based on no previous
>> experience you say!
> 
> Well, no previous LINUX experience. I've been working on computers since 
> I have a memory. My father was an Electrical Engineering professor in 
> Venezuela, and we always had computers in the house. With that 
> background it's been (amazingly) simple to pick up on how Linux works.
> 
>> Why are you using StarOffice instead of OpenOffice.org (aka OOo) which 
>> is to
>> StarOffice as Mozilla is to Netscape?  OOo is free software and part
>> of the base edubuntu install.
> 
> This was my boss's choice. I honestly don't know what the difference is 
> between OOo 2 and StarOffice 8, functionally speaking.
> 
>> I have no experience with Ghost, what we (MIT CompSci and Artificial
>> Intelligence Lab) use to manage our Debian install base is "FAI"
>> http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/.  It's almost certainly more
>> complicated to set up but is likely within your powers given how far
>> you've gotten.  After systems are installed we use cfengine
>> http://www.cfengine.org/ to keep configurations syncronized and to
>> push patches.  I know cfengine is an available package, I'm not sure
>> about FAI...it's not a "friendly" pair of tool I must admit.
> 
> I may certainly look at those in the future, but I'm more interested at 
> the moment in improving the end-user experience for students and teachers.
> 
> All the administrative stuff is invisible and incomprehensible to them 
> for the most part, and I just wanted a solution in place so I could 
> release my updates as I made them. I hacked away at the problem with 
> Ghost (a tool that we have a license for that our corporate IS people 
> don't use anymore as they've moved to Altiris) and it works.
> 
> So now I have a computer on my desk, hostnamed nordx--image. I work on 
> it to design the system the end-user gets to see. I use Ghost to make 
> backup--in case some direction I take the image in comes to a 
> screeching, crashing halt for some reason--and once a week I take the 
> latest backup I'm comfortable distributing and blow it out to the 
> workstations.
> 
> I'm only imaging one partition on the hard disks when I update, hda2.
> 
> The image is composed of 4 partitions. One FreeDOS partition (hda1) up 
> front running that just boots to FreeDOS and runs "GRUB for DOS". 
> Automatically this will boot to the second partition (my Edubuntu 
> partition, hda2), unless the default has been changed (usually remotely 
> with a bash script I concocted with some help from my local Linux Users 
> Group) in which case it boots to a floppy disk image which runs the 
> Ghost client. The third partition (hda3) contains local information 
> unique to the workstation (so far only identifying information, room 
> number and workstation number), which the workstation passes through 
> BASH scripts everytime it gets updated in order to configure itself 
> (hostname, NetBIOS name, and printer ip address). Of course there's also 
> a Linux SWAP partition (hda4)
> 
> My system is a bit convoluted, which is a result of my newbieness I'm 
> sure, but it has been succesful in enabling me to work. I'm a lazy 
> man--and I'm designing for non-technical people--so my goal is generally 
> to reduce the number of steps to perform a task to one or as close to 
> that as feasible. If I can do that, I feel I've been somewhat succesful.
> 
>> If you don't get an answer from soemone with direct experience about
>> authenticating against a Windows domain, I have the facilities to test
>> this and will try and make the time as it sounds like a common problem
>> with getting Linux into schools.  Here we do the opposite windows
>> domain clients authenticate against our Linux based Kerberos realm.
> 
> You know, based on my short experience with Linux, that's what I would 
> do if I was designing a network from the ground up.
> 
> Here we're working with a firmly establish IS department that has been 
> homogenously Microsoft for quite a long time, now. We've been notified 
> that they are too busy, and are not allocating any time to anything 
> Linux related.
> 
> This means that anything I want to do with the Linux computers as far as 
> making them play nice with our established network services is all on 
> me. Well, not all on me in reality; I've been very impressed with the 
> amount of help the Linux community at large has been, and I'm very 
> grateful to benefit from that.
> 
>> -Jon
> 
> Thank you very much for your reply, Jon!
> 


-- 
   ___
  (   )   Peace, Paz, Paix, Shanti, Mir, Shalom and Salaam
   \ /
 >=-Y-=<                  Simón A. Ruiz
    |                    Technology Aide
    |              Bloomington High School North
    ^