[CoLoCo] I converted an elementary school to Linux

[Jeffrey LePage]

A few more details.

It's not a big school: 10 classrooms (3 primary, 4 lower-El, 3 upper-el), less than 300 kids.  There are now 20 Linux desktops for the teachers/staff, a total of 10 Asus Eee PC's for the kids, and 24 non-Eee linux laptops for the kids.  Plus the servers (firewall, old Win2k3, samba server, dansguardian web filter, data backup server), and 3 legacy windows desktops.  Still, that comes to 62 computers.  It's a lot for one part-time person to deal with.  I'm also committed to supporting any personal laptops that students and staff will be using at the school.

I also run the school's websites: www.freehorizonmontessori.org (the main one), www.communitysupportnetwork.org (associated with a satellite organization, and still under construction), and moodle.freehorizonmontessori.org (our new online classroom site).

And there's a lot more to do.  I exaggerated about the non-Eee laptops. They're running Xubuntu now, and I'm not satisfied with the configuration.  I'll probably work on those this and next weekend.  

Also I'm having problems getting the samba browsing to work on the Eee's.  With a little prompting I can get them to find the PDC, but they insist on forcing the user to login for each and every single file in the share.  Very irritating.

I need to re-load the OS on the old and very flaky Dell Win2k3 server, but we've lost the media.  I'm told I can use a MSDN disk and enter the OEM license key that came with the server.  Does anyone know if this is correct?  It used to be our PDC, but now it's just going to be used to support legacy windows apps.  Teachers and staff will access it via remote desktop.  The re-building of this system can wait for a few weeks.  

David Willson alluded to the troubles I had with samba.  Most of these were due to my own inexperience, plus a bug (fixed in 3.0.31) that causes problems with samba PDC's running winbind.  Hardy Heron uses Samba 3.0.28a.  

School starts the 18th, and I still have work to do.   However, I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Someone mentioned that they wanted to help with building the backup server.  Send me a message at jeffrey_lepage at yahoo.com.  I'll be building the server at my house on Saturday.  

I'm also going to be building a Koha server to replace our aging Athena library management system.  That will have to wait for a while.  

When the dust settles in a few weeks I'd like to show off the system.  We should plan something.  

In many ways the system is probably an example of how NOT to do things, but I'm confident that any defects can be fixed.

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