Fw: Ubuntu for School (epic93dude at gmail.com)

[Joseph Hartman]

No, unfortunately for 200 self-standing computers the cost would be $12,000
per year. You can see how this gets pretty ridiculous pretty quickly.

There may be an alternative for your particular situation called the Linux
Terminal Server Project (LTSP). If you know your IT history you know that
computers used to all be connected as terminals to a mainframe that was the
size of a house and powered everything. The terminals were basically just
tentacles with a screen that reached back to the mainframe which did all the
computing. Banks still use this architecture today to protect their
information (if a terminal is stolen, no data is lost). Of course, as
computing power grew, so did the capabilities of the terminals until the
mainframe (or server as we would use nowadays) was no longer necessary. That
may not be the best history lesson, but you get the idea.

Of course, this terminal server architecture is still possible and alive in
many schools across the country. It makes sense for schools for all the same
reasons it makes sense for banks, plus terminals can be super cheap (you can
even use old crappy computers if you want) so that saves money. You can read
a lot more about LTSP on the ubuntu site, and there is tons of stuff in the
edubuntu users listserv if you are interested. That list is actually far
more active than this one for some reason.

Before you get too excited, you should know that there are serious drawbacks
to LTSP. I used it pretty extensively over the last 4 years and abandoned it
as soon as I possibly could, but I worked at a school where I was the only
IT support person and I was only staffed at that position for 4 hours per
week and I had to do it after the normal school day or on the weekend. It
sounds like your school is in a better situation to start so it may be
different for you.

Basically LTSP is (in my experience) an elegant, robust solution that is
also very fickle and requires regular oversight. It allows ultimate control
over terminal computers because everything is really run off of the server.
This means the admin can lock individual terminals, send messages, share
their screen, share the screen of a given terminal, log out any or all
terminals, run programs on any or all terminals and watch what is happening
on any or all terminals from a maintenance screen among other things. This
power is alluring, but requires serious hardware and the programs can, at
times, be very buggy and unreliable (although I should point out that there
are incredible people working on all aspects of LTSP and it is improving at
an impressive rate).

My biggest problem though was the fact that there were too many single
points of failure. If the server fails or is off, ALL your computers go
down. If the link from the server to the switch fails, ALL your computers go
down. If the switch fails or is off or someone accidentally disconnects it
with their foot or something, ALL your computers go down. You get the idea.
Anyways, I used it because we had no choice. I had Pentium 2 computers to
work with and LTSP allowed them to get on the internet which is what I
needed. As soon as we had some P4s donated though, LTSP was out the door.

So if you did decide to go the LTSP route with your 6 servers, then
landscape would cost you $360 per year, even though those 6 servers would be
powering 200 individual terminals. I am still hoping you will lobby
Canonical to give Landscape away for free though... Good Luck -Joe

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 5:35 PM, <epic93dude at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks. I'll see what I can do. Luckily, were at a small school with a
> couple hundred client PCs max (three or four labs plus teacher's computers)
> and roughly six or so servers. This landscape software may be a great way to
> make ubuntu more appealing to our IT staff. Does that put the landscape cost
> around $360 per year?
> Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joseph Hartman <jlhartman at gmail.com>
> Sender: ubuntu-education-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com
> Date: Wed, 13 Oct 2010 17:19:11
> To: <ubuntu-education at lists.ubuntu.com>
> Subject: Re: Fw: Ubuntu for School (epic93dude at gmail.com)
>
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