[luau] Status of Mililani High School

[Brian Low]

Aloha Warren,
  I can help you ion  the Intel NetExpress prit servers.  I have worked
with these print servers before.  I can also help you out on that old
Novell 4.10 lab.  I can make it over there in the afternoon on Friday.
You can also give me a call if this does not work for you.  

Thanks,
Brian

Brian Low
Security X
1515 Nuuanu Ave. #555
Honolulu, HI 96817
Phone: (808) 371-3571
E-Mail: securityx at runbox.com


-----Original Message-----
From: luau-admin at videl.ics.hawaii.edu
[mailto:luau-admin at videl.ics.hawaii.edu]On Behalf Of Warren Togami
Sent: Thursday, August 15, 2002 10:47 AM
To: luau at videl.ics.hawaii.edu
Subject: [luau] Status of Mililani High School


Yesterday I was at Mililani from 8am to 5pm working on their SunRay and
Windows Celeron lab.

As I mentioned earlier, the SunRay lab was extremely poorly put together
with an underpowered Sun E250 server, initially with only 1 processor
and 1GB of RAM.  Sun donated a second processor and another GB of RAM,
but it still couldn't handle 30 clients.  After a wasted investment of
$40,000, the school was suffering for an entire school year with an
entire lab of computers that were almost useless.  It couldn't handle
everyone running StarOffice at the same time, and logging out took
something like 10 minutes.  Mililani was so displeased with the lab,
that they were seriously thinking about getting rid of it for a loss,
but nobody would want to buy it from them anyway.

Many of the issues here was an extremely poor understanding of Unix by
whoever set this up.  There was no SSH, SSHD, gcc, grep, awk and many
other tools.  The support person did almost entirely remote
administration through telnet and FTP.  I had never touched Solaris in
my life, and I knew things were horribly wrong on this setup.

To make matters worse,  even though the school supposedly bought a 3
year support contract, the DOE lost their SunRay support person due to
some braindead DOE reorganization.  Now something like 50 schools with
SunRay (mostly on Maui) have almost ZERO support.  I told the Sun guys
and Mililani that the group and I will support the Mililani lab on a
volunteer basis.  I have no doubt that we can make the lab work great
because we actually have a clue how to properly use Unix.

Yesterday Cliff Goto (DOE's Sun + Lotus Notes admin) came with two Sun
technicians to swap out the E250 with a DOE owned E450 with four 300MHz
processors and 2GB of RAM.  After the server swap things appear to be
running a lot smoother, StarOffice 5.2 appears to run better, and people
are able to login and logout into CDE quickly.  The lab is currently in
a somewhat usable state, probably for the first time in its life.

Remaining problems: