[seul-edu] Response to Kayle RE the Fight ahead

["Kevin Stiles" <kstiles@pasco.wednet.edu>]

Kyle,

Good points, all of them.  And yes, I thought of alot of them already.  
The main point I was making is that if we can't get a consenses with 
the techs that use OSS software and systems to go that route, we need 
to seriously evaluate the route we are taking.  I am NOT saying that it 
is a lost cause, I am NOT saying that we (and I do mean WE, count me 
in!) should not advocate the use of OSS.  I firmly believe that the 
current software licensing, payment options, and upgrade (forced) to 
maintain compatibility with the rest of the world are seriously 
shackling and draining what resources our schools have available.  We 
were able to do most of the wiring and infrastructure in our District 
due to Gov. grants, but they are long gone and not to return.  Now, to 
make a couple of comments...

You mentioned several times that the points I made were valid for Voc 
schools.  Our District is very heavily pathways based.  Over 75% of our 
students are in vocational programs and they start preparing for such 
as early as 7th grade.  Our demographics show that an estimated 80% of 
our students will never attend any college.  Consequently we try our 
hardest to give them skills they can use directly in the outside 
world.  It also makes the Vocational department a very powerful friend 
or foe.  And we (the Tech Department) has had its fights with them :-)

I agree that the skills that we should be teaching are the general 
ability to get the job done with whatever tools are available.  
Unfortunately many of our staff cannot get over the concept of what 
tool they are using.  When the District decided upon PC based 
hardware/software, one of the reasons is that they wanted to have 
student techs build and maintain the systems.  Not too many students 
can go to an employer with three years experience, formal training and 
proven ability as a computer tech.  The reply from the teacher's union 
(very strong in our area) was an official grievance that we were taking 
away the only tools they knew how to use (Macs).  I will support 
whatever is decided upon, yes I have preferences, but it is my job and 
obligation to do the best I can (and influence the course I think best).

AR, Star, and many other "Standard" teaching apps should be easily used 
with the vendor making one minor change:  Make them web-based.  Most of 
these apps are not time-critical enough to warrant a local client.  
Those that are can be served with a Java front-end.  Development costs 
for the vendors could be greatly reduced by using OSS themselves: 
derivitive of Apache for stand-alone servers, MySql for the database, 
PHP or Perl for the scripting, someproprietary extensions to keep a 
competitor from "stealing" their system.  All the above is cross 
platform and could run on windows, mac, linux, whatever platforms.  Now 
to get the vendors on board...  And no, I will NEVER tell anyone that 
if they want something, program it.  Some of us are not programmers and 
never will be.  But we can be excellent resources for those that are 
and are looking for something to do:-)

Our techs are highly cross-trained, very capable and interested in 
anything to do with computers.  They are strong in Novell, NT, Win9X, 
interaction with the networking, printing issues, and resolving 
software/hardware issues.  They also have experience with MacOS.  They 
have little or no experience with Linux, at least on the desktop.  
There are many little nuances in any system, only experience can give 
you the ability to instinctively deduce and correct problems.  
Unfortunately, none of us have the time or resources (machines in use 
that students are killing :-) to aquire this type of knowledge in a 
time-frame that would be acceptable for support issues.  Not that they 
would not want to or are not able to.  We do have a certain amount of 
knowledge on the server side of it and are actively cross-training in 
case something happens to me :-)

A small list of items that we have done/are doing that help the cause.  
The two years of computer engineering classes I taught for the Voc 
department got a crash course in Linux.  I made them use it as their 
only desktop for two months and spent almost three on the server 
aspect, including web, file/print with Samba and MarsNWE, and 
integration into existing systems.  Hence there are 40 additional 
HS/College students that know the basics of the system.  I also know 
that at least 8 of them are using the systems for their home servers!  
Three years ago, after much arguing and fighting, my boss and our 
network admin (a good friend of mine) finally gave in and let me 
install a linux box as a proxy/NAT server, allowing us to put 30 
additional machines on the Internet at the High School.  We now have 3 
of these machines, running Linux, Squid, MySQL in the District, two at 
the middle schools, one at the District level.  The scripting on these 
machines (developed by me before I even knew someone else might be 
interested in it) allows the teachers in the lab and libraries 
throughout the district to turn on/off internet access to over 900 
machines.  In combination, they cache an average of 47% of all pages 
viewed by the supported machines and cough up over 300,000 web pages a 
day.  Last reboot for the District proxy: June 2, the day I put the new 
kernel on it.  Last unexplained failure: Jan of last year.  Longest 
downtime: 1 hour.  Next success story, when we put our first building 
on fiber, we had difficulties getting our BayStack routers to talk to 
the V-Lans on our Cisco level 3 switch, it kept dropping IPX packets.  
I setup a Linux box with MarsNWE (Netware Emulation) and set its ques 
to print IP to the HP printers.  CLients logged into it via IPX, like 
any other Novell server and it handled all print jobs for 4 labs while 
we fought our route issues.  After we got it fixed, it was taken 
offline.  These two items have earned more than a small amount of 
respect within our department and the District for the capabilities of 
the systems.  Very good PR.  Last, I discussed this afternoon loading 
GIMP on a lab in one of our elementaries and we have been discussing 
using Star Office for teacher and lab machines instead of Microsoft.  
So there is hope.

ThanX for the opinions,

Kevin Stiles
P.S. I would LOVE it for a teacher to come back from a conferance and 
want "That system with the Foot".

----Push is the force exerted upon the door marked "Pull".----