[K12OSN] OT: Apple Imac lab

[Les Mikesell]

Steven Santos wrote:
> Dave,
> 
> Stick to your guns on the OO.o for the Macs, as I think that’s the big
> slippery slope.  
> 
> You volunteer your time adminning the Linux boxes.  Adding this lab of Mac's
> will add a significant amount of work to you.  What I don't understand is
> why you agreed to take on that extra work.  
> 
> If I were you, I would drop a few "this is a LOT of work I am not sure I can
> do on a volunteer basis... We may need to look at a support contract for all
> these Macs..."

Macs - a lot of work??? I think you'll have a bit of a credibility 
problem with that.  Expensive, yes, but...

>  If you have a few quotes from Mac shops about supporting
> that lab with comparable uptime to the LTSP system (is that 99.999 or
> 99.9999 uptime...),

You might need some spares to make that number - with either system.

> I think you will find a lot more traction for your side
> of things.  Just make sure to spec the quotes correctly so that they have to
> interface seamlessly with the existing servers, have the ability to netboot
> as LTSP/Win workstation, and whatever else you can think of.  I strongly
> suspect such a contract will cost many times more than the lab itself.   

If you want to use fully-loaded Macs as clients to an LTSP system, the 
easy way is to run the NX client with freenx on the server.

--
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com