[K12OSN] A very good day at VCS

[David Trask]

Phew!  After days of sweating it out I finally crested the mountain.  Now
it's grunt work from here on in.  After 2 weeks of vacation I came back
with the intent to get my servers all redone and up and running.  Two days
of no internet (outside the building) and so forth really set me back.  In
addition to that...a teacher who decided to hook up her own
computers....never undid the rats nest of wire and simply plugged in two
ends.....after much pulling my hair out and finally going to the network
closet and saying "to hell with it" we pulled every single wire
out....replaced a couple switches (new ones I had been meaning to install
anyway) and rewired the entire network closet.  In that process we found
the "loop".  This teacher had plugged in two ends of the same cord...thus
creating a loop and a heckuva' lot of network traffic.  Anyway....once
that was solved....things started to ge well.

Here's what I've done.  Last year I had a Windows network (10.0.x.x) and a
K12LTSP network (192.168.0.x).  This worked fine and I was able to tie the
networks together with an IP alias for the purpose of the Windows machine
authenticating to the domain controller on the other subnet. 
Anyway....Terrel Prude had posted a good how-to a few months back on how
to  use a differnt DHCP server with K12LTSP.  At first I wanted to use it
with my SME server which was serving my DHCP, but SME is very difficult to
wrestle to do what you want sometimes...in this case add specific options
to dhcpd.conf.  I was able to add some, but the section for the images
would not go.  So I had another server kicking around not doing anything
so I loaded Fedora Core 1 using the K12LTSP discs for 4.01.  I installed
the k12ltsp version of dhcpd.conf so I would have all of the necessary
options already.  I then took the already generated static IP's from the
dhcpd.conf file on my SME server...added them to the the file on the new
server.  (This incidentally is an easy way to generate this file if you
have a lot of entries.  I do for all of my printers and airports...use Abe
Loveless's batch-hosts script at www.tech-geeks.org/contrib/loveless).... 
I now have my K12LTSP server, Samba-LDAP server, a new DHCP server, my SME
server (proxy, firewall, internet filter), a SME server for backups and
staff FTP access to files.....etc.  ALL ON THE SAME NETWORK!  YAY!  

Now...in my building no matter where you sit....you can log into Linux or
Windows...access your profile....etc.  My next step (as soon as the
software arrives) is to set up a Windows 2003 terminal server so my users
will simply be able to click an icon from within Linux (on their very
inexpensive THIN client mind you!) and work with Windows apps or an entire
Windows desktop....VERY COOL!  Works well...I 've tried it with Win2K
terminal server.  Anyway....I'm off to Exeter NH for a week to teach a
linux class and help set up a Linux Charter School....Weee!  Hope everyone
is having a good summer.  

Now it's all grunt work....putting machines back and imaging them....(When
I get back....THEN...I'll think about doing the laptops)  ;-)

David N. Trask
Technology Teacher/Coordinator
Vassalboro Community School
dtrask at vcs.u52.k12.me.us
(207)923-3100