[K12OSN] Proposal due Monday, feedback welcome

[David Trask]

"A technical support and discussion community for users of the K12OS 
Linux distribution." <k12osn at redhat.com> writes:
>(The Baht can be converted to US$ by dividing by about
>40)
>In a casual conversation with my new school's
>secretary while we were travelling to a seminar, I
>mentioned setting up the school with computers. I said
>that I could probably do it for about 90k Baht with
>thin clients. Well, I have now been asked to make a
>formal proposal to the school director on Monday, and
>am looking for some feedback.
>
>First, the requirements (or, since the director
>doesn't know anything, what I look at as
>requirements):
>
>    * One or more servers to serve the thin clients,

One good server can handle this easily....I have a Dual Xeon with 4 GB RAM
running almost 50 clients
>
>    * About thirteen clients, scattered throughout the
>school, though more if I can,

Easily done
>
>    * Software to handle document exchange,
>scheduling, etc...

Not sure what you mean by this....Groupware?
>
>    * Software to administer the school and track
>students,

OpenAdmin
>
>    * Internet access on a dial-up which limited
>numbers of folks can turn on or off,

dial up will be prohibitively slow fo that many clients
>
>    * Minimum admin work, able to be done by someone
>as an extra duty (and not, me, though I will have time
>to train). 

Once set up....maintenance is minimal and can be done remotely in most
cases
>
>
>I am likely to:
>
>   1. Buy two used Compaqs with dual PIIs and RAID
>4.9GB disks X9 that I saw for 15K each recently
>      Total cost 30,000 Baht;
>   2. Bump the RAM on these to over a GB each
>      Ttotal cost 6,000 Baht
>   3. Purchase clients off a shipment from Japan ot
>the US, P200s 32 MB RAM, 2MB video, at about 900 Baht
>each
>      Total cost 12,000 Baht;
>   4. Monitors from Japan for 1,500 Baht each
>      19,000 Baht;
>   5. Buy an old PII to run Smoothwall or ?ECop? 3,500
>Baht;
>   6. Buy a new 16 port switch with one or two gigabit
>ports and one or two gigabit cards for the servers
>???? Baht;

Amer.com has a 24 port with dual gig uplink for about $199 US

>
>   7. Use the rest to purchase mice and keyboards;
>   8. Use IceWM with limited menus to limit the memory
>consumption per client;

Highly recommended.....IceWm is much better
>
>   9. Use one server for thin client use and the other
>for scheduling software, documents, and mail. Rsync
>the two servers nightly to allow me to turn services
>on in case of failure of one of them.
>  10. Use eGroupware, a fork of PhPGroupware, which I
>have used before.
>  11. Use Webmin to divide the admin tasks among
>several folks.
>  12. Possibly use SchoolMation 1.0, but survive on
>eGroupware alone if I can;
>  13. And try, for the first time in my life, to set
>up an IMAP mail setup for use inside eGroupware. 
>
>This is an order of magnitude beyond anything I've
>done before, but I don't suspect that I'll have any
>problems with this setup. Suggestions and/or flames
>are welcome...
>Daniel



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