Re: [school-discuss] LTSP and school-provided networks on same physical infrastructure

["Stewart M. Ives" <ivessm@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Daniel,

I suggest you find someone that knows what their talking about and have then
design your network for you.  They will come on-site and review what you have
and the condition of the facilities and make a determination as to what can be
used and what has to be upgraded.

I support a K-8 school in New Cumberland, PA, and we have a really first rate
system in the school and it all works quite well.

A little time spent at the beginning of such a project will insure a
successful install at the end of the project.

Also, don't get a sales guy in there, get a technical guy in there to make the
recommendations.

stew

---------- Original Message -----------
From: Daniel Howard <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: schoolforge-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wed, 29 Jun 2005 20:05:58 -0400
Subject: [school-discuss] LTSP and school-provided networks on same physical
infrastructure

> One dilemma that we're running into in our transition to K12LTSP is 
> how to use the existing school network infrastructure for two 
> independent networks.  Until we can convince the city school 
> district otherwise, they'll likely insist that we keep the teacher's 
> Win XP computers on the school district's network, fed to the school 
> via unreliable T1.  The PTA is willing to pay for a business-tier 
> cable modem service (5 Mbps down, 384kbps up) to the school, and we 
> want to feed the K12LTSP servers and all clients (computer lab and 
> classrooms) via this cable modem network using the web filtering 
> capability of K12LTSP (Squidgard, IIRC).  Problem: only one network 
> cable is run to each class, so we have to feed both networks via the 
> same cabling, all of which lead star-topology into the wiring closet 
> (although maybe a few extensions via switches at the end of one 
> cable run feeding multiple rooms).
> 
> Logically, can we just leave the teacher's PCs talking to the school 
> district's gateway and their T1, while our Linux thin client servers 
> talk to the cable modem router and to the thin clients over the same 
> Cat5 cable?  Will there be problems with net booting, collisions, etc?
> 
> Any other ideas for solutions to this conundrum?  Ultimately down 
> the road, we envision the district approving the K12LTSP solution 
> and allowing us to combine both T1 and cable modem data feeds to the 
> school into a common router (so that we have more total bandwidth 
> for all PCs, plus a backup architecture) and the teachers ultimately 
> using OSS for their admin applications on thin clients in each 
> classroom, but who knows how long that will take...
> 
> Regards,
> Daniel
> 
> Daniel Howard
> President and CEO
> Quadrock Communications, Inc
> 404.264.9123 main
> 678.528.5839 fax
> 404.625.1593 cell
------- End of Original Message -------