On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 4:09 PM, Anu Chirinos <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > > We are looking into providing VCL services to our community's middle and > high schools. My concern is with the network between FIU and these schools. > Where other universities are proving this type service, what kind of network > connectivity do you have to those end users? Are they using just a commodity > network, or is there other special considerations?
There are two separate considerations - the networking itself and the "filtering". The network in the classroom will, these days, usually be wi-fi. If every student has a laptop, then the access point needs to be able to handle that number of concurrent sessions and many of the older/cheaper ones don't do 15 or more all that well - in those cases two are needed. Reaching the VCL's web presence (login, reservation, ...) is just going to a web site. But then the school firewall needs to have the RDP ports open to do an RDP session with a Windows image. (We have found that not all school technical people are willing to open those ports - aargh!) Then there is the WAN portion - which needs to have sufficient bandwidth - and we've found that 1Mbps or better works - but we're not working with very large schools. I suspect that 10Mbps is a better place to be. Latency usually isn't a big problem in a decent WAN, but on interactive programs such as Geometer's Sketch Pad, when drawing one can notice a small lag between the mouse movement and the appearance of a line on the screen. CIPA (the Child Internet Protection Act) requires each school district to decide how they will keep the students from reaching inappropriate web sites. So the districts vary all over the place as to how this is to be done. The filtering can be done on premises, or the traffic can be routed to a remote location (e.g. *your* machine room :-) where filtering is done for all the schools you are working with (but only if they all buy into this arrangement.) There are a lot of providers of filtering software (which has to include a database and an update arrangement) - but I'm not up on that. In NC, our local REN, MCNC, provides networking to many/most/all of our school districts and makes Zscaler filtering available to them, with the school districts arranging for their own file which sets the parameters for filtering. --henry schaffer > > Thanks, > > Anu Chirinos > Assistant Director - Enterprise Systems > Florida International University > Office: 305-348-0275, Cell: 786-712-9025 >
