[seul-edu] [Fwd: Another bite about the editorial :)]

[Doug Loss <dloss@suscom.net>]

I'm forwarding this message from Jaime Herazo from Barranquilla, Colombia, with his
permission.  He's joined this mailing list, so you can reply to him here if you
like.  Welcome, Jaime!

jherazo@geocities.com wrote:

> Hi. I work at a school here as the "sorta sysadmin": i was hired to do physical
> manteinance of the computer room and administrative computers, check that
> things work well, and all that stuff (i'm still a student, so they put me as
> the "computer janitor"). This school is from my church, so you can guess the
> butget for this. The shock was seeing the "computer lab": 1
> Cx5x86-133/32RAM/2GbHDD unlicensed Novell server, and 12 diskless PC's assorted
> (1 386, 1 486, the rest 5x86, all with 16 Mb RAM, and some with VGA cards with
> monocrome monitors) booting from floppy, logging to the server all as the same
> username without password (you can imagine the result of giving all the school
> full access to all the computers), and loading unlicensed windows 3.1 and
> office 4.2. The curriculum: teaching students how to use the mouse, write a
> letter, and basically depend on those pieces of software for everything; and
> for the younger students, prince of persia and similar heavily educative stuff.
>
> I've been fighting them to upgrade the so called computer room into something
> more bearable, and i've made progress: A new server was bought (PII 350/128 Mb
> RAM/8 Gb HDD, i asked for less because the server was starting to fail, but i
> wont cry over this one :), the parents'association (sorry, don't know the exact
> translation and i'm at home without somebody to ask to, it's "asociacion de
> padres de familia") donated 10 Quantum Fireball 4.3 Gb, the RAM has been
> upgraded in all to 24 Mb. (and maybe i can get them to upgrade it to at least
> 32), and there's the possibility of changing the 4 year old coaxial cable to 10
> Base-T.
>
> As for the software, i've been testing the use of full linux as server and
> desktop (mainly because here have been a lot of "antipiracy raids", and there's
> not a dime to spend on software, but at least as the server is a LOT better). On
> the server i have NIS/NFS, on the clients a full install and remote-mounting the
> users directory so they can use any computer as _their_ computer (a better idea
> on how to avoid wasting half of the harddisks without going back to floppies?).
> I have had some problems with the MSOffice equivalents (Abiword dies when
> somebody uses capital Ñ and i haven't posted out a bugreport yet, maybe today;
> Maxwell looks plainly ugly, and StarOffice puts as its requeriments a minimum
> of 32Mb RAM, so it spends about 2 minutes to only load, and after that it
> "skips frames" sometimes; add to it that in the 4 plain VGA ones it only shows
> a big window completely black on the inside).
>
> And the curriculum: i have talked with the director, and she thinks that what
> they've been teaching is good, because is what they'll find out there, and that
> teaching them programming is "stealing their money" (her words), because that's
> not what they'll do when they go out. (now you know the kind of geniuses that
> are here). And about that there's another problem: the only teacher is a
> spanish teacher with additional training in computers. She has problems moving
> around StarOffice because the things are not in the same places....
>
> This is the first time i've been doing things on this scale (i guess playing
> with my computer at home is not quite the same thing, in the network there are
> a lot of things to think about that won't happen at home), and i would
> appreciate any suggestion from somebody that has more experience on this than
> me (not that i'm a dummy or something, mounting a network like this is not
> something they teach at college, or at least not in MY college :)
>
> Thanks (and sorry for the long rant, there's not much people here that has a
> clue, but a lot of dummies that think that linux is a laxative or something).
>
> ----------------------------------
> Jaime Herazo B.
> E-Mail: jherazo@geocities.com
> Date: 27-Mar-2000
> Time: 21:55:24
>
> This message was sent by XFMail
> ----------------------------------

--
Doug Loss                 Even if you're on the right track,
Data Network Coordinator  you'll get run over if you just
Bloomsburg University     sit there.
dloss@bloomu.edu                Will Rogers