Re: Edu Howto Followup

[Mark Harvey <markh@forcetech.com.au>]

Daniel Glenn wrote:
> 
> Our English school here in Taiwan has decided to move to LINUX.
> 
> We will be upgrading our old and deteriorating Pentium 100s (5 of them).
> 
> We will be purchasing new computers as well. This is where we would
> appreciate some help in planning. I myself ran LINUX a little bit back 3
> years ago before I came to Taiwan, but mostly I played with OS/2 then. I
> have experience being a user on UNIX networks (I have a minor in
> computer science, but I have no Experience setting it all up.
> 
> Goal:
> Have a Local Area network with all computers in the network.
> Allow all users to have their own space on the network (account).
> Have 8 Stations in the computer room, with 4 more (1 in each classroom).
> (the 4 in classrooms would probably be the old P100s)
> 
> We of course need security set up so our students (9-13 year old kids)
> don't go mucking about in the system the way they did when we had Win95
> set up (this is our primary reason for getting away from Win95, it was
> always such a mess if we let the kids do anything without supervision,
> we need the system to limit their access, and make sure they aren't
> deleting each other's files or screwing them up. Most importantly we
> can't have them bringing in virus laced disks. We kind of figure 9-13
> year
> old Taiwanese kids will have a lot harder time finding viruses to bring
> to our system if it LINUX)
> 
> Mostly the students will simply be using Netscape Composer to write up
> documents and at the end of a project combine theirs with the other
> classmate's documents to form a web page.  I know Composer isn't the
> best
> way to edit and make web pages, but for 9-13 year olds, it is the
> simplest.
> 
> For the time being we don't want to put the network on the Internet. But
> perhaps by summer if all goes well we will go ahead and get a T1
> connection into the school and set up a web server so the students can
> access their work from home.
> 
> So, the question is, how do we set this up under LINUX? Any suggestions
> on hardware? Such as network cards, what the File Server should look
> like, etc.
> 
> Our URL: http://www.angelfire.com/on/WhiteHorse/
> 
>   ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
>   Daniel Glenn <danielrg@ms3.hinet.net>
> 
>   Daniel Glenn
>     <danielrg@ms3.hinet.net>
>   Additional Information:
>   Last Name     Glenn
>   First Name    Daniel
>   Version       2.1


Here's what I would recomend.

Linux - RedHat 5.2. Very easy to install.

Get Xwindows working.

Change an entry in /etc/inittab to look like the following

id:5:initdefault:

This will cause Xwindows (xdm) to start on default. You get a graphical
Login screen.

From there it is a matter of creating login accounts etc on the boxes.

If you want to, you can run NIS (Yellow Pages) and have centralised
passwd control however I have not set this up as yet.

Regards
Mark Harvey