Re: Servers as appliances

[Tonnesen Steve <tonnesen@cmsd.bc.ca>]

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On Sun, 23 May 1999, Ray Olszewski wrote:

> 1. Do you need a full distribution, or would a set of custom installation
> scripts tied to one of the major distributions be sufficient? The few things

This was never my intention.  Not sure who brought that up.  I use Debian
on all my servers.  K12Admin is packaged for Debian and RedHat.  What we
do for server setup here is make a tarball of a server and copy it to the
hard drive of new installs, then we just change the hostname here and
there and it's off.  We use the same fake ip address ranges in all the
schools.

K12Admin should be distro-agnostic for most, if not all, features.  The
"Server on a CD" idea originated from the Oracle request, not me.  My
question was more intended to come up with a standard setup for network
shares (ie Library, Admin, Apps, Localgroups, etc.) for K-12 school
servers.  I still haven't had any comment on this aspect of my original
post.


> 2. Is the Oracle tie-in consistent with the observation that the system
> would have to support mainly Mac and PC clients? I looked at the Oracle
> site, and the program seemed very geared to Oracle's specific view of
> Network Computing. Or is the Oracle site out of date, at least in its emphasis?

I'm certainly no expert on Oracle's plans.  My understanding is that they
have pledged $100 million to put internet workstations in schools.  To
date they have been using some kind of network computers.  The person who
contacted me is evaluating using Linux servers and workstations in the
same context.  If I find out more, I'll post information here.  I'll
suggest that they join seul-edu as well.


> 3. Have you looked at the setup systems used by products like the Cobalt
> Qube? I've only read reviews of the product, not seen it in action, but the
> reviews make it sound like there's a lot to be learned about simplifying
> setup from a system like this. (Is any of their stuff GPL'd? I can't find
> any materials available for downloading at their Web site.)

If you find anything for me to look at, let me know.


Steve Tonnesen.

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