Re: X-servers for Win & Mac Re: Introduction

["Matthew Wright" <mattyw@hotmail.com>]

I have already done a lot of research into setting up the lab, I welcome 
all of your suggestions, i'll just list a few problems with various 
things that have been discussed since I joined.

For students at my school, forcing them to dial into get files would be 
discriminatry as not all of them have a modem let alone a computer.
This is not an option at least in the next 2 years as I can not see 100% 
of them getting modems in that time frame.

The mounting of floppies is a real problem, and automounting them in 
some way is ideally what I want to happen(as yet i haven't got a viable 
choice for this).  The students need floppies so they can save their 
WP8/Staroffice (i'll give them choice) work. Take them home and use them 
on Word97 at home (The fact is that when I introduce this system 100% of 
students will be using win3.1 or 95.

I was planning to run a VNC daemon on a P450/256mb/4.3gbUWscsid machine 
with all apps installed on that machine to serve my lab of 10-15 (can't 
remember how many are broken down) win3.1 remote boot prom machines in 
the maths/science lab.

As the machines only have 4mb ram and no hard disk this would be the 
best way to have an Xserver and Xapps display. (but i'm as yet not sure 
about how much bandwidth this will use.

I would set up VNC so that it disconnected EVERY session, Also on this 
network i'd use guest logins for now.

ANother possibility would be to have two main computers, one dedicated 
to running the VNC daemon, and another computer for running Xclients 
(Applications) 

Then comes the third option. This option at this time seems very good. 
Just add main (server) computers for particular applications until the 
speed of the system is acceptable. (all have same spec as above)
ie 1 computer for running VNC daemon and handling that load. 2 for 
handling Corel Office (when its released) Another for handling Gimp 
Staroffice misc, one computer to handle Netscape (Netscape is hungry 
bloatware) And if something there was too memory intensive then another 
computer to alleviate that. etc etc.

I also need some type of Software for printing, where the kids goto the 
staff room or library and pay 2 dollarsAUD for 20 printing credits. when 
their credits run out their print job fails in some respect (hopefully 
giving them some feedback ie Go purchase more credits from library or 
staff room) If anyone knows about such software could they please tell 
me about it.

Excuse the English it is not my forte and i'm feeling rather self 
concious using poor grammar/spelling on a list full of teachers.

Thats all for now, I look forward to anyones ideas/solutions.

Regards

Matthew Wright
Network/Systems Administrator
Swinburne Senior Secondary College

______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com