Your feedback is much appreciated

[ramonsagullo at yahoo.com]

Tod, thank you so much for these informative insight.

As to the booting with WAN - I am inclined to have all the clients in the computer lab NOT to have a hard drive, less power consumption and less stress for the labs air conditioning. It can get pretty hot and balmy here in the tropics. :-)  Am inclined to minimize the cost of our new computer lab, by going wireless. Utmost, the kids may use their thumb drives to store their files, aside from the server.

Since our current curriculum (and the mission of the lab) is basic proficiency in word processing, general application of using a spreadsheet and how to efficiently browse the web. On a midterm goal, a vocational course on basic web authoring; I would love the kids to also try their hands on basic animation, that is, if there is a decent free software out there.

99% of our students do not own a personal computer.  The appeal of eway.com's relatively inexpensive thin clients is, I am looking also for some public/private sponsorship to have these FOSS boxes sold at cost to some of these kids.  I also am in the initial stage for our local government to sponsor some out-of-school youth to spend their creative time with these mini-computers.

The thin client I saw on eway.com is appealing, but I have to factor in the cost of importing these from Taiwan, and the difficulty of having parts for replacement, etc.  And I like the size factor too.  Cute. Saves a lot of desk space..  Yet, am inclined to go with the local shops back here, and put the parts together, since buying a ready-to-use PC clone will add at least 20% mark-up, not to mention the cost of Windows. Tiny cases like the ones in eway, we don't have back here.

As to the server, I do have my "shopping list" of parts to put together.  Going the HP path is more of to save me the time and headache :-) At the moment, I am a lone ranger, and most of the Board of Trustees are at that age where any techno-speak is beyond their generational comprehension. :-)

 
I will seriously try to convince that we get as much memory as the school budget will allow.  Thank you for this tip. In my browsing, I once read an article that 64MB per client is "decent."

BTW, aside form the cost of Windows, your "maybe" sounds more apt when it comes to, "Windows will NOT flash the 'program not responding' ?" :-)

Again, many thanks for your feedback.

Ramon "Mon" M. Sagullo
Speak your truth kindly, if you must.
Humbly respect other's truth.
But never compromise your truth. - RSInForm


 


----- Original Message ----
From: Todd O'Bryan <toddobryan at mac.com>

One of the wonderful things about LTSP is that the clients don't do
much. As long as their video and net connections are fast enough, you
can probably use them for 8 or 10 years as long as you update the server
every few years and don't want bigger monitors than they can handle or
lots of streaming video.

I can't comment on the specs with much expertise, but they look pretty
good to me. Obviously, the best thing to do is to try to get one and try
it to see if it meets your needs. 
 
Depending on what you're doing, 2GB of RAM may be low. I'd get 4GB (or
more if you can afford it). If everyone is using OpenOffice and Firefox
and one or two other applications, you can start wishing you had more
RAM pretty quickly. I teach computer programming and was shocked to
discover that the IDE I use in my intro programming class was gobbling
up 100MB per student.

Make sure that each switch (switch, NOT router) has a couple of gigabit
ports so that you can do gigabit from the the server to the switches and
then 100Mbit from the switches to the clients. This helps keep
everything humming along.

If you're worried about upgrading, try to get a motherboard that you can
switch out the CPU on, so that you can upgrade just by buying a faster
CPU rather than a new motherboard or a whole new server. Not sure if the
Proliant fits the bill here, but it's worth checking.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. If you're asking if you can plug
your thin clients into a network you already have that currently goes to
the internet, the answer is maybe. If you can make sure that the thin
client can find the server and only the server is answering PXE
requests, then, yes, this is possible. If you're asking something else,
then the answer is probably also maybe. :-)

Todd









 
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