[seul-edu] Linux in the homeschool environment (1 man's setup)

[Jim Wildman <jawildman@cfanet.com>]

(I should have included all of the urls, but that would take another
day...so I'll post a summary of links to the various programs later.)

I thought it might be interesting to share some of the ways that I am
using my Linux boxes in our homeschool setting.  Most of these are just
home applications of business techniques.  But the challenge for us is
how to make these available to those who are not professional system
administrators like myself.  I've taken a number of steps to monitor my
children's online activities as well as to provide some protection for
my wife's email.

To begin with, of course, I use a Linux box to connect to the Internet.
It is configured to use pppd's dialon demand option.  Anytime someone
needs to connect, it does it for them.  Naturally it includes the
usual firewall setup and configuration.  The only outside access to the
box is via ssh, with RSA hostkey encryption enabled.  This means that my
laptop is the only machine that can connect to the firewall from
outside.  It is running the PortSentry port monitoring software from
Psionic.

Within the house we have the 2 Linux servers, 3 Linux workstations
and 3 W95 boxes.  The dialup/firewall machine is a 486 and the main
server is a Pentium 166 with around 14G of ide disk drive and 64Meg of
memory (need more memory).

The workstations mount /usr/local from the main server
(so I only install programs once!) and query the server for their X
logins.  The W95 boxes use the main server as a file and print server.
I have a LaserJet 3Si on the network for fast printing (the Lord blessed
and I got it for <$300.  Duplexing and all)

The main Linux box provides most of the rest of the functionality.  It
collects email from numerous accounts using fetchmail.  My wife uses
Pegasus on a Win95 box to pop her email off the server.  The kids all
use pine or kmail from one of the other Linux boxes to read and send
email.  I've configured sendmail (using Linuxconf) to rewrite their
outgoing email addresses to match their geocities' accounts.  (Some day
I'll get my own domain and real addresses!)  I have added procmail
recipes to copy me on any email that the kids receive.  I also copy all
of my wife's email to a dummy account in case she says "Honey, I deleted
a really important message.  Can you get it back?".  Makes me look
good!!  The server also forwards some of my email to whatever my current
work address is (I'm a consultant who is typically on long assignments).

The server backs all of the kids' and wife's files up to a second hard
drive every night.  The wife's computer is backup using smbtar, since
she keeps her files on her local machine.

The other major service running on the server is Squid and SquidGuard.
All http requests within the house run through the server.  SquidGuard
is a url redirector that checks the urls against a database of
acceptable/nonacceptable list.  Blocked urls are redirected to a page
served up by the copy of Apache which is also running on this box.  It
is configurable enough that I can block specific sites at particular
times of the day.  ie, keep my son from spending 'school time'
researching the latest in Ford truck prices :-).  I run a nonstandard
version of SquidGuard which I hacked to add syslog based logging of all
http lookups.

All of the activities on the servers are monitored by logcheck and
reported to me. This includes the dns lookups. 

The Linux workstations run RH6.0 and the Kde desktop.  I have a licensed
copy of WordPerfect 8 for Linux which they share.  Since we use WP on
the Win boxen, this gives the kids a consistent interface.  Several of
the kids use gtimer to track their hours by subject.  They also play the
games and have figured out how to customize their desktops.  Since the
workstations are either 486's or low end Pentium boxes, I did not
install Netscape.  They use the kde browser for Internet access.  They
tell me that they don't have any trouble with the various sites they
visit.  They also use a bible program that I found, and Quanta for web
page design work.  Several of them are gradually learning the basics of
Linux/Unix administration or are interested in learning Perl (which is
something I am using a lot of at work right now.)

I see two areas of Linux which need help.  One is the continued
development of support and educational programs that run on Linux.  For
various reasons (age of kids, etc) I haven't installed any 'educational'
programs.  It is my intent to have some of the Windows programs running
under Wine, but I haven't gotten to that yet.  The other area is in
systems which are preconfigured to do some of this work.  But for much
of it to be meaningful, you have to have a home lan and multiple
machines.  I'm not sure how many home schoolers are ready for that.  

I hope this has been useful.  Feel free to ask questions about any part
of it.  
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Wildman                         Senior Consultant, 3X Corporation
jawildman@cfanet.com                jim.wildman@3x.com  www.3x.com
http://www.cfanet.com/jawildman     (513)587-3647