[K12OSN] K12LTSP: High School Experiences

[Mark Gumprecht]

Larry,
Because of monetary constraints, K12ltsp has saved my butt! In the High 
school I have 2 K12ltsp servers, 1 serving the library and 1 serving the 
high school wing. I have a centos4 smbldap domain controller. All has 
been pretty smooth sailing. I had some quotas hit do to a rouge 425mb 
folder on a desktop. Definitely redirect the desktops to their home 
folder. The kids love the terminals, term 150e's from 
www.disklessworkstation.com, w/17" lcds. Some are old computers with the 
aopen bootables in them. The BIGGEST CHALLENGE HAS BEEN THE TEACHERS. 
Their acceptence has been very low. IMHO, training, training, training. 
I failed to train the staff enough to get them used to seeing the 
terminal. Know your openoffice, inside and out. There are tutorials on 
the website to help 
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-7351?q=StarOffice+8&s=t
and a nice graphical site as well
http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/solutions/staroffice/star_tutorial/index.html
The big stumbling block for most of the teachers is the "Lack" of a 
Micro$oft icon on the desktop for word and excel. If you can walk right 
up and whip out there answer in front of them, they tend to look a 
little harder before doubting the ability of the program again. I did 
install 1 terminal in the library in the beginning of last year to see 
what the usage would be. By the end of the year, there were 3 terminals 
and my squid logs showed that they were the most used computers in the 
library. I also have 3 elementary schools that are completely driven by 
a smbldap/k12ltsp servers. There is a howto in the wiki on ibooks and 
authing against the smbldap server, that was a big one, if you have ibooks.
HTH
Mark

Larry Mateo wrote:

>I'm requesting that some members of the K12LTSP community please write about positive and negative experiences that have been encountered when running a K12LTSP system at the high school level.
>
>We at the Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District have three K12LTSP systems running in middle schools; environments in which the students are either disinterested in or ignorant of the underlying technology, so we have few problems with security, hacking, gaming and like issues that we have encountered with our NetWare systems at the high schools.  We are debating installing K12LTSP systems in high schools, and would like some input on real-world issues we will be facing and their possible solutions.
>
>Thanks in advance.
>
>Larry Mateo
>Network Technician II
>Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District
>larrym at fsusd.k12.ca.us
>
>
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-- 
Mark Gumprecht
Data Systems Specialist
MSAD3
Unity, ME
gumprechtm at msad3.org