Midwestern Christian Academy (Cont.)
January 30, 2007 by Alan McColl RedHat 9.0 has since been replaced by the Fedora Project. Fedora is a RedHat sponsored project contributed to by a world wide community. Read about it here. Here's what we wanted our new (to us) server to do;
- File server (provide one location for personal and shared files)
- Printer sharing
- Provide central logon authentication
- Have the students' profiles follow them to different lab computers
- Provide automated backups
- Provide Internet access with firewall and content filtering
We were able to accomplish all these tasks and more using all open
source software. Firstly, we created a domain using a project called
Samba. Samba is a service running on the server that emulates a Windows
NT file server and acts as a primary domain controller and a WINS
server for the Win9X machines. Users authenticate on the domain with
their username and password to be given access to shares and printers.
We used roaming profiles so that the students don't have to be assigned
a particular workstation. Their private shares (home folder), my
documents folder, and personalized settings (desktop shortcuts,
wallpaper, appearance etc.) follow them to the machine they logon to.
All personal settings, files on the desktop, and my documents contents
are stored in the /home/username direcory on the server making backups
a breeze. We could have done the firewall on the Compaq server, but
chose to use a separate machine (proxy server). 
An old PII 333 MHz with
64 MB ram and 2 NICs does a fine job of providing a NAT firewall with
stateful packet inspection (iptables), web page caching (Squid), and
content filtering (DansGuardian). The only way to the internet is
through this server. Therefore, we can filter out most, if not all the
bad stuff.
An old PII 333 MHz with
64 MB ram and 2 NICs does a fine job of providing a NAT firewall with
stateful packet inspection (iptables), web page caching (Squid), and
content filtering (DansGuardian). The only way to the internet is
through this server. Therefore, we can filter out most, if not all the
bad stuff.More Upgrading
The kids raised some money though candy and coupon book sales. This provided us with the means to purchase new flat panel monitors. This freed much needed room on the desktops from the bulky CRTs.While searching the Internet for info on open source for schools, I stumbled on to the K12 Linux Terminal Server Project (K12LTSP). The idea is to build a terminal server that uses old PCs as the clients, or you can buy thin clients for around $200 each. The clients don't need fast CPUs or much RAM. They don't use their local disks either. All that's needed is a bootable network card (or you can boot from a floppy), a video card, a modest amount of RAM, monitor, keyboard, and a mouse. The "thin client" boots. From the server, it requests and receives an IP address, then downloads an operating system kernel image to RAM. You then logon to the terminal server. All the applications are run on the server. You receive the video signal for your monitor over the network, and deliver keyboard strokes and mouse clicks back. Your performance is limited only by the speed of your server and number of simultaneous connected clients.
The installation CDs are based on the Fedora Linux platform and come with a wide variety of educational software and the fine open source office suite OpenOffice.org, which reads and writes Word, Excel, and Power Point documents. If you're not already using this very robust, and free office suite, download it here.
I did a cost comparison between a lab running Windows and Linux. With Windows, we would need new workstations, XP Pro, Office, W2k or W2k3 Server, plus CALs for all the clients that connect to the server. With Linux, we reused the old workstations and downloaded the software. Either way, we needed a new server. I figure we saved around $8,000.00.
