Shamattawa is so far off the beaten path, one might not expect Earth-shaking changes to come from there, but that would be wrong. Like many schools in many places, Shamattawa uses computers that are a few years old. There are four generations here:
- a couple of DEC Vectras from the early 1990′s
- a bunch of machines from the late 1990′s that started out with Lose 98
- a bunch of good IBM machines from 2003 or so
- a bunch of ACER machines from a similar date.
The problem is how to maintain all that software and boxes. There are over 50 machines and no full time tech. Just me, and I have a day job. When I got to the lab there was an OS but little else. There was only one browser. Yes, that one, that security experts recommend not be used. Most machines had no typing tutor and no word processor. There was ony one thing to do… I plugged in my personal machine as a terminal server and hunted down the cables to the lab machines and connected them to a couple of switches on my LAN port. A gigabit/s switch was set up to loop detection for 30s or more so I could not use that. It was just too slow. My boot loader times out. Finally, I had the lab working from my machine. As it had handled 30 seats previously, I thought 24 would be a piece of cake. Little did I know that Grade 1s are not afraid to click things multiple times! I restricted their menus and added a second terminal server, an old Xeon box that had some guts. I added 2 gB RAM and it worked.
That is a solution that many schools could use. Maintain a small number of servers and use the clients to boot PXE from the server. Instantly the maintenance chore is cut way down. A fairly ordinary box can run 30 clients so the load is reduced a factor of 30. Buying new servers could make that ratio much higher, perhaps 200 or more. Why do they not do that?
The machines not in the lab could not use that solution. Many were not networked. They had passwords unknown blocking any maintenance of software. I had to hunt for a tool to do that. I put chntpw on my thumb drive but these old machines cannot boot from it so I use RescueCD. It has NTFS-3g to mount the partitions and chntpw to reset the Administrator password. Still it takes a few minutes and there are many machines. I have to find them and visit them. A complete waste of time. I am writing a proposal to put a server in each building and make a clean sweep. Then I just have to access the BIOS. I can unplug the hard drives to save power. Better, I could wipe them and install Linux on them as a backup in case the terminal server should fail. I can always do that over the network while the clients are running. I have to get that network extended.
So there are the travails of the computer teacher in a remote outpost. I have to find parts, fix things and make things work. So far I have made about 40 machines work. I need wireless to get the remote folks networked. There is a proposal afoot to use some of the decent machines as servers in the classrooms so multi-seat X or thin clients can be used. We can put a lab machine in each classroom as multi-seaters and six in the lab, to cut the heat and noise. Can’t do that with that other OS! Thank goodness for GNU/Linux. Officially, I get 40 minutes a day to do this stuff, but with walking about, that amounts to fixing only a couple of problems. Time will tell if we get it all to work. The only way the system will double in size and keep working is with Linux and LTSP. Thick clients will not do. That would become a full-time job.
Just imagine keeping track of all the installation CDs and licences with that other OS. With GNU/Linux, I set up a local repository and install over the network and I am done. No extra paperwork except to write a manual for how to keep it going, which is easy. Sit down and watch it hum. Literally. Apart from logging off students who misbehave or killing unnecessary apps or bringing forth the password sheet yet again, there isn’t much to do with LTSP. With 24 Grade 1s afoot there is no time anyway. They need help instantly the whole class long. Usually, they have exited GCompris or want to get out of Tuxpaint… It is the workout of the day. Fortunately it is scheduled for the start of the day when I am fresh. With crontab I have the terminal server automated, switching desktops for the younger grades to the middle years and typing tutors.
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There’s a “Free for personal use” multi-seat commercial product that achieves the same end goal with a stable end result with dramatically less effort (albeit at slightly higher cost).
Though the software is commercial http://userful.com (though an opensource project http://openuserful.sourceforge.net/ is in the works). it saves you money on hardware, allowing you to use $20/head video cards, and $5 USB keyboards and setup and configure it in 5 minutes.
How is Userful’s product different from or better than other multi-seat approaches?
Userful’s approach virtualizes a single instance of X to support multiple users. Other multi-seat approaches start separate instances of X (one for each user). The separate instance approach has the following limitations:
1. They don’t support using both heads on consumer dual head cards. 2. They are very finicky about the graphics cards and chipsets supported. 3. They are less resource efficient (each instance of X imposes a RAM and CPU overhead).
Userful has been deploying multi-station Linux since early 2002 and developed some GPL’d kernel and X patches back in 2002 to help make multi-station work. Eventually they switched to this new approach because of the difficulties listed above.
Userful Multiplier package also includes some graphical install and configuration tools, cross distro testing and quality assurance, and builds RPM/DEB packages to make installation and removal on supported distros comparatively effortless.
the free version is available here: http://userful.com/products/free-2-user
I have used Groovix, too. It is pretty easy. Install Ubuntu, add Groovix repository and run a script.
Userful has proprietary parts. I like Groovix because it is FLOSS. These day Multi-seat X is better supported in X so it is getting easier. I am retired now so I may not have occasion to try it again.