Great, this was wonderful information. I may come back with more questions once we really start to move on. I did not even think of CIPA.
Anu On 3/21/13 8:01 PM, "Henry Schaffer" <[email protected]> wrote: >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 >>
