[K12OSN] off the shelf PC as Server

[robert pogson]

Petre Scheie wrote:

"Providing computers to people by buying everyone a fat client is the
obvious answer, but it isn't the best answer.  And when you look at
the purchase,
management, maintenance, reliability, and disposal costs of fat
clients, in many cases,
they are not even a viable answer."

Amen to that! In the last month I installed 109 thin clients in a new
school. I can reconfigure anything in minutes instead of days. I am
saving a ton of energy daily and the classrooms are quieter and
cooler. At the Grand Opening, the designers of my lab space came by to
see it in action and their mouths fell open at the abundance of
computing power available compared to the usual school. They designed
air-cooling for 6 kilowatts and we were using about 0.5 kw. I used off
the shelf parts to make our servers. In a test one dual core server
ran the school for two days with no apparent sluggishness because not
everyone was online at the same time. With four servers humming the
whole school can dance together and we will have redundancy instead of
headaches. Running Linux instead of that other OS, thin clients
instead of fat and gigabit instead of 100 saved us enough to double
the number of clients and servers. Thank goodness for LDAP, too. We
can sustain rates of over 100 megabyts/s between the servers. We can
do magic with this system instead of that boring stuff from 2001.

For teachers, students and staff the servers provide individual
websites for each account, local mail service, encryption key service,
LDAP, http, none of that "synchronizing files" stuff, 24 big hard
drives in a distributed RAID array, databases, dynamic sites with
encylopaedia, images database, bulletin board, library software and
whatever we want instead of what Bill wants to give us. I turned a
boring software applications course into an exciting adventure with
encryption and instant e-mail, database for everyone, multiple
word-processors and spreadsheets, and powerful machines for multimedia
processing. With this technology we can put our money where it will do
the most good instead of having huge resources idling.

Robert Pogson
Have Server, will travel