Aloha Warren, I can help you ion the Intel NetExpress prit servers. I have worked with these print servers before. I can also help you out on that old Novell 4.10 lab. I can make it over there in the afternoon on Friday. You can also give me a call if this does not work for you.
Thanks, Brian Brian Low Security X 1515 Nuuanu Ave. #555 Honolulu, HI 96817 Phone: (808) 371-3571 E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Warren Togami Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2002 10:47 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [luau] Status of Mililani High School Yesterday I was at Mililani from 8am to 5pm working on their SunRay and Windows Celeron lab. As I mentioned earlier, the SunRay lab was extremely poorly put together with an underpowered Sun E250 server, initially with only 1 processor and 1GB of RAM. Sun donated a second processor and another GB of RAM, but it still couldn't handle 30 clients. After a wasted investment of $40,000, the school was suffering for an entire school year with an entire lab of computers that were almost useless. It couldn't handle everyone running StarOffice at the same time, and logging out took something like 10 minutes. Mililani was so displeased with the lab, that they were seriously thinking about getting rid of it for a loss, but nobody would want to buy it from them anyway. Many of the issues here was an extremely poor understanding of Unix by whoever set this up. There was no SSH, SSHD, gcc, grep, awk and many other tools. The support person did almost entirely remote administration through telnet and FTP. I had never touched Solaris in my life, and I knew things were horribly wrong on this setup. To make matters worse, even though the school supposedly bought a 3 year support contract, the DOE lost their SunRay support person due to some braindead DOE reorganization. Now something like 50 schools with SunRay (mostly on Maui) have almost ZERO support. I told the Sun guys and Mililani that the group and I will support the Mililani lab on a volunteer basis. I have no doubt that we can make the lab work great because we actually have a clue how to properly use Unix. Yesterday Cliff Goto (DOE's Sun + Lotus Notes admin) came with two Sun technicians to swap out the E250 with a DOE owned E450 with four 300MHz processors and 2GB of RAM. After the server swap things appear to be running a lot smoother, StarOffice 5.2 appears to run better, and people are able to login and logout into CDE quickly. The lab is currently in a somewhat usable state, probably for the first time in its life. Remaining problems: >From here a serious amount of work will be needed fixing up the Solaris installation. It is currently running Solaris 7 and an old version of the SunRay protocol software, and it is uncertain whether Sun will supply a free upgrade or charge money for it. IMHO Sun should provide it for free considering the amount of problems the school has had with their product. Prior to this server swap, Ginlack, the Principal of Mililani was considering approaching "ActionLine" to make public this bad situation that was bordering scandalous, with a $40,000 lab being almost completely broken for over a year - what an interesting public relations nightmare that would have made, $40k wasted taxpayer money, hundreds of kids being denied an opportunity of technology learning. I suspect that the current Solaris 7 installation is poorly secured and possibly already compromised. Eventually I'd like to do a complete reinstall and I could use help from the group from people knowledgeable with Solaris. For now though, all the GNU tools should be installed including a working compiler, then OpenSSH and VNC so it can be securely administrated remotely. Java SDK should be installed. StarOffice 5.2 should be upgraded to StarOffice 6.0, but I need to write some scripts to handle automatic profile creation so people don't have to go through the somewhat confusing "Workstation" install for each user. I already have these scripts for StarOffice 6.0 on Linux, so this shouldn't be too hard if the GNU tools that it depends on are installed. After these things are stable, I'd like to replace the current CDE desktop with Gnome2. Mililani had a Windows Celeron lab served by an ancient Novell 4.10 server doing only a print queue. This lab was not uplinked into the school network, so they were running only IPX. Unfortunately the lack of Internet makes it extremely difficult because they teach Oracle and Java in that room. When they do plug the room into the Internet, the Windows machines easily DHCP and go online, but suddenly printing stops working and the Novell server beeps like crazy. After some analysis Elayne and I figured out that the Intel print server appliance was talking only IPX, and it was severely confused when the campus network is connected to that lab. It would somehow be confused by some other Novell server elsewhere on campus, lose its connection to the local Novell server (talking IPX) and stop printing. We attempted to use its built in TCP/IP accessible control panel in order to enable SMB protocol printing, but it seemed to be completely unresponsive to anything over TCP/IP protocol despite its diagnostic printout saying it had a valid IP address. I ended up setting up a temporary Linux NAT box using MonMotha's script to isolate IPX into that room, while allowing the Windows machines Internet access. This is a temporary kludge until I get around to replacing the Novell print queue with a Samba print queue on that Linux box. For now the teacher is happy, and I trained her in logging to the Linux console and enabling or disabling eth0. She likes the flexibility of disabling the Internet within that room during certain classes so it wont be a distraction for the students when they don't need it for certain lessons. This is the same teacher that needs an Oracle server for students to practice SQL statements. There is still the possibility of a Linux thin client lab for two classrooms. More details on this later... What Help Is Needed for Mililani -------------------- 1. Solaris knowledgeable help. I am going in today to install GNU tools and SSHD so I can continue working on it from home. I think I can handle this much, but I will need help with more difficult things like operating system upgrades later. 2. Oracle on Linux help. 3. Intel Netexpress print server appliance and Samba print queue setup. I haven't done a Samba print queue before. Has anyone configured that before? I may need help in figuring out how the Intel appliance can be re-configured to work with anything other than IPX. 4. Later the school is interested in Unix knowledgeable people coming in to help train some teachers and students in Solaris and Linux, and also mentor students in certain Unix related projects. More details later... Warren Togami [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ LUAU mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/luau
