Simón A. Ruiz wrote:
Jonathan D. Proulx wrote:
$DIETY bless you!
*lol* I quite enjoyed that.
That's quite an impressive setup you have ther,e based on no previous
experience you say!
Well, no previous LINUX experience. I've been working on computers since
I have a memory. My father was an Electrical Engineering professor in
Venezuela, and we always had computers in the house. With that
background it's been (amazingly) simple to pick up on how Linux works.
Why are you using StarOffice instead of OpenOffice.org (aka OOo) which
is to
StarOffice as Mozilla is to Netscape? OOo is free software and part
of the base edubuntu install.
This was my boss's choice. I honestly don't know what the difference is
between OOo 2 and StarOffice 8, functionally speaking.
I have no experience with Ghost, what we (MIT CompSci and Artificial
Intelligence Lab) use to manage our Debian install base is "FAI"
http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/. It's almost certainly more
complicated to set up but is likely within your powers given how far
you've gotten. After systems are installed we use cfengine
http://www.cfengine.org/ to keep configurations syncronized and to
push patches. I know cfengine is an available package, I'm not sure
about FAI...it's not a "friendly" pair of tool I must admit.
I may certainly look at those in the future, but I'm more interested at
the moment in improving the end-user experience for students and teachers.
All the administrative stuff is invisible and incomprehensible to them
for the most part, and I just wanted a solution in place so I could
release my updates as I made them. I hacked away at the problem with
Ghost (a tool that we have a license for that our corporate IS people
don't use anymore as they've moved to Altiris) and it works.
So now I have a computer on my desk, hostnamed nordx--image. I work on
it to design the system the end-user gets to see. I use Ghost to make
backup--in case some direction I take the image in comes to a
screeching, crashing halt for some reason--and once a week I take the
latest backup I'm comfortable distributing and blow it out to the
workstations.
I'm only imaging one partition on the hard disks when I update, hda2.
The image is composed of 4 partitions. One FreeDOS partition (hda1) up
front running that just boots to FreeDOS and runs "GRUB for DOS".
Automatically this will boot to the second partition (my Edubuntu
partition, hda2), unless the default has been changed (usually remotely
with a bash script I concocted with some help from my local Linux Users
Group) in which case it boots to a floppy disk image which runs the
Ghost client. The third partition (hda3) contains local information
unique to the workstation (so far only identifying information, room
number and workstation number), which the workstation passes through
BASH scripts everytime it gets updated in order to configure itself
(hostname, NetBIOS name, and printer ip address). Of course there's also
a Linux SWAP partition (hda4)
My system is a bit convoluted, which is a result of my newbieness I'm
sure, but it has been succesful in enabling me to work. I'm a lazy
man--and I'm designing for non-technical people--so my goal is generally
to reduce the number of steps to perform a task to one or as close to
that as feasible. If I can do that, I feel I've been somewhat succesful.
If you don't get an answer from soemone with direct experience about
authenticating against a Windows domain, I have the facilities to test
this and will try and make the time as it sounds like a common problem
with getting Linux into schools. Here we do the opposite windows
domain clients authenticate against our Linux based Kerberos realm.
You know, based on my short experience with Linux, that's what I would
do if I was designing a network from the ground up.
Here we're working with a firmly establish IS department that has been
homogenously Microsoft for quite a long time, now. We've been notified
that they are too busy, and are not allocating any time to anything
Linux related.
This means that anything I want to do with the Linux computers as far as
making them play nice with our established network services is all on
me. Well, not all on me in reality; I've been very impressed with the
amount of help the Linux community at large has been, and I'm very
grateful to benefit from that.
-Jon
Thank you very much for your reply, Jon!
--
___
( ) Peace, Paz, Paix, Shanti, Mir, Shalom and Salaam
\ /
>=-Y-=< Simón A. Ruiz
| Technology Aide
| Bloomington High School North
^
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