[K12OSN] Accelerated Reader/Renaissance Place

["Terrell Prudé, Jr."]

Hello Brad,

I can't comment on Opterons, never having used them (yet!), but I can 
comment on its 32-bit brother, the Athlon MP.  Up until very recently, I 
was running a single-NIC dual-Athlon 1.47GHz system with 4GB DRAM and 
Gigabit Ethernet.  This server supported 25 clients and has run K12LTSP 
2.1.2, 3.1.2, and finally 4.2.1 (I find that I really like 4.2.1).  
During its two-year existence, it impressed not only the principal and 
the students, but also (eventually) the teachers with its speed and 
stability; it actually had headroom for maybe 15 more terminals.  
Additionally, it was performing file-server duties via Samba for the 
Windows clients.  At all times, it ran without even a single hiccup; the 
only thing that took it down unexpectedly was an extended power outage.

My experience has taught me that our biggest friends for most tasks are, 
in the following order, DRAM, Gig-E, and then CPU oomph.  If you're 
doing anything disk-I/O-intensive (e. g. heavy Samba or NFS file 
serving), consider RAID.  That said, for what I was doing, plain ol' IDE 
sufficed quite nicely, probably due to all that DRAM.

At the time I built it, it cost just under US$2,000 to do so.

--TP

Brad Johnson wrote:

> Greetings everyone,
>
> Let me start off by saying that I've followed this list for the better
> part of a year without ever posting anything, so I'm a first-timer.  I
> am the technology director for a 5 school district with approximately
> 1500 students in Iowa.  With our ever-shrinking budget, I have been
> pushing for Linux on the desktop for some time.  My superintendent loves
> the idea, and is totally for LTSP throughout the district.  Naturally,
> we have some school board and staff members that are not entirely
> receptive to the idea....you know the drill....we need Microsoft, etc.
> At any rate, this summer I purchased the materials to build a dual
> processing opteron server with 4 gigs of memory.  When I told the
> superintendent about the purchase and the cost(roughly $1600 from
> Newegg.com) he really fell in love with the idea.  Last week, I finally
> talked a teacher into allowing some of her old junkers to be "upgraded"
> to LTSP thin clients, as well as a computer in our high school media
> center, and one additional client in my office.  The immediate reaction
> is very positive--teacher and other staff members are very impressed
> with the speed of the system!  I would eventually like to put about 20
> clients on this system to see how the system reacts under a pretty full
> load.  Can any of you comment on a fully loaded (20-25 clients) running
> on a dual opteron, 4 gig, WD Raptor hard drive setup?
>
> Now on to my real question.  Are any of you using the web-based version
> of Accelerated Reader(Renaissance Place) with LTSP or Linux?  If so, how
> is it working for you?  The people at Renaissance have assured me that
> this will indeed work, but can't give me the names of any districts that
> are currently using LTSP with RP.  When I go to RP website, I am able to
> use their sample quizzes within Firefox with no problem, using the flash
> plugin.  I am going to try to convice RP to let my district test/pilot
> RP with LTSP/Linux so I can be assured that I'm not going to pay for a
> product that won't work.  Any comments/advice welcome.
>
> Regards,
>
> Brad Johnson