[K12OSN] Tuning LTSP Performance

[Terrell Prude' Jr.]

James P. Kinney III wrote:
> It is pretty easy to insert a switch between the upstream feed side in a
> classroom and the classroom switch itself. But that only gets the
> traffic in the classroom. If the setup is using a classroom server model
> (teacher sits at the server console, thin clients for the kids), then
> only traffic between the server and back-end storage server (and web
> crap, etc) is available.
>
>   

Agreed.  The only time that I'd consider that a major concern is if 
staff members are accessing their Student Information System (SIS) from 
the LTSP thin clients.  In that case, SSH encryption becomes a very good 
thing.

> The fun part is: an kid smart enough to know how to get the right switch
> that support port mirroring, and can pull this off, should be working
> for the school immediately! This does 2 things: sends a message that
> smart, clever people are actually good (Yay! Education!) and most
> importantly the school now has a bit of oversight on the student with
> excellent hacking skills. Getting them involved in a positive way helps
> deter the "turn to the darkside" that getting in trouble will encourage.
>   

There's a lot of truth to that.  My district is blessed to have a magnet 
school, Thomas Jefferson HS for Science and Technology, in it, and thus 
I get to see what they do in their Systems Lab.

At TJHSST, the students are the sysadmins for the school's Internet and 
"intranet" presence.  Yep, the students.  Sure, there's an adult advisor 
of the Systems Lab, where all that stuff's done, but about the only 
thing the kids *don't* run is the SIS (it uses separate 
authentication).  They handle everything else.

These kids run a very tight ship, for exactly the reasons that James 
specified above.  Anybody tries cracking that network, the student 
sysadmin team members consider that absolutely unacceptable ("hey, this 
is *our* network, and it's for *everyone* to use, not just you!"), and 
they go into Sherlock Holmes mode.  The offender(s) are then swiftly and 
severely dealt with by the school administration--and that includes any 
misbehaving teachers, not just other kids.  Remember, since this is a 
magnet school, 15% of whose kids go on to MIT, these kids are basically 
all geniuses.

BTW, their choice of distro is Debian GNU/Linux.  That's largely because 
they can easily run it on their PMac and SPARC boxes, too (they've got 
several of those).

--TP