Re: [seul-edu] Technology Conference

["Chris Hobbs" <chobbs@silvervalley.k12.ca.us>]

"Pete St. Onge" wrote:
> 
> Chris,
> 
> Do you have any hard numbers for your upgrade project? I mean (other
> than the costs of the file servers and such you detail on your web site)
> in terms of:
> 
> - How much time it took to set up?

Lots - probably 200+ hours - since that's about 10% of my work year, we
can figure that cost at about $6000 - of course, a lot of that was spent
on my time, so cut that number in half for the District's cost. Divide
that by the 120 terminals we installed, and that adds about $25 per
terminal. But that has to be tempered by the fact that I was not a *nix
sysadmin when I got started. I had played around a bit with Linux at
home, but did not have anywhere near the skill set required for this
kind of project (don't tell management :-). I've learned a lot more
about the OS as a whole, and believe a competent sysadmin could set it
up with very little effort. I could probably configure all of the
software required for a lab in one day now, if that. 

The credit for this goes to Jacques Gelinas' xterm kit
(http://www.solucorp.qc.ca/). It automoates much of what is neccessary
to make the terminals single disk boots.

> - How much time did you spend on client machines?

Hmm. A half hour to open the case on one of the refurbed 486's, figure
out what video chipset it had, and copy that info into all of the
directories for the terminals. That's all the configuration required for
the terminals.

> - How much time do you spend supporting client machines since
>     then (/week)?

We've just rolled them out, but I don't expect to directly support the
terminals at all. They'll either boot or they won't - if a single
terminal won't boot, it's hardware. If lots won't boot, then it's my
server. Since all of the terminals' directory structure is mounted RO
from the server, they can't screw any software up.

> - How much time did you spend on the server?

See above. Much of what I did was expanding on what Jacques' kit
supplied. His system is tailored to a particualr group of terminals
talking to one server for both apps and files. My system was
considerably more complex, as it involved a main fileserver and several
application servers, and the terminals being able to connect to any of
the application servers. The system is completely transparent to users,
which is as much as I could have hoped for. Wherever they sit down,
whatever app server they choose, it all looks the same to them.

> - How much time do you spend supporting the server (/week)?

Right now it is significant, as we find problems and tune the system a
bit - some are dumb things (like the default config file for xfs that I
was using only allowed 4 client connections - whoops :-). I may make
some changes to the way the terms operate (perhaps booting them off of
the application servers instead of all off the fileserver to spread the
load). I'm definitely still in the learning and tweaking stages, but I'm
feeling much more confident!

> This would be very useful in making the case in other educational
> environments. I may be trying to make such a pitch soon, actually, so
> any advice you might offer would be greatly appreciated.

Surprisingly, I got very little resistance when I presented the concept.
Since the High School itself had determined that the primary need was
for Office applications and the ability to search the Internet, they
were very open to whatever technological solution met those goals for
the best value. If Macintosh or Windows had been the best value, I'd be
installing them instead. 

Their primary concern was, as it should be, what tools fill these needs.
Second was the cost, and third was the availability (uptime) of the
resources. Once I demonstrated a working Linux system (at the time using
WordPerfect, though we switched to StarOffice), described the costs, and
assured them that these terminals would have significantly higher uptime
than comparable Windows or Mac based systems, they were sold. Don't get
off too far in the technical mumbo jumbo with them, unless they are
really going to understand it (do they really care about NIS and shadow
passwords, etc.?) - focus on the benefits they're likely to see. The
benefits you as a systems administrator care about will likely generate
a blank stare :-)

The biggest trouble I've seen in educational circles wrt technology is
that they choose hardware first ("We're a Mac school!"), then buy some
software, then try to figure out how to use that in the classroom. I
give the teachers responsible for planning the grant spending at our
high school a ton of credit for breaking that cycle. They decided first
what skills they wanted to teach children; I recommended appropriate
software for those tasks, an appropriate OS that ran that software, and
then approporiate hardware to run that OS on. I can't see a better way
of doing things than this. 

If you're still dealing with teachers/administrators that are still
looking at tech from the hardware end, I've got no real suggestions
other than trying to get their focus changed. Get them focused on the
learning that's supposed to be happening, and work back from there.
They'll save a lot of time and money, and the technology will see more
use.

Wow, didn't really expect to go on like this, but I hope it's helpful to
some of you. I'll be happy to answer any other questions - keep 'em
coming!

Chris Hobbs
Silver Valley Unified School District
 
> Nice work on the web pages, btw. :)

Thanks, I appreciate that!