[luau] MPLUG Status 11/23/2002

[Warren Togami]

Currently I am swamped with homework and projects so all of the advocacy 
and Linux in school projects are on hold until late December unless 
others step up to the plate.  Please read the following project status 
and let me know if you can help.

I have decided to take a semester off of college during Spring 2003 in 
order to focus on Linux research, development and advocacy.  I will 
spend all of my time until Fall 2003 working on the following projects.


1) "Linux for Education Showcase" at Mid-Pacific Institute
-----------
We are rapidly approaching a point at MPI where Linux servers and LDAP 
central authentication will be adopted.  Late December we will begin to 
transition all the teachers from the current unstable Windows based 
e-mail server to Linux (uw imap, Sendmail, SpamAssassin, Vipul's Razor, 
virus scanning).  This e-mail server roll-out will be the beginning of 
Linux based LDAP central authentication on Mid-Pac campus.  Immediately 
upon LDAP implementation, the LTSP thin client lab will use LDAP for 
authentication.  Before mid-2003 we will integrate the Windows clients 
on the school network with LDAP/Samba.

http://diradmin.open-it.org/
We will be using "Directory Administrator" in order to easily manage 
LDAP authentication.

MPI is also in the process of implementing another LTSP thin client lab 
in lower campus.  This will probably occur sometime around January.

Late December we are converting all Windows machines to use Mozilla as 
the campus standard browser, replacing the deprecated Netscape 4.x.

I personally will need to learn much about LDAP, Samba and Windows 
domain configuration in order to make this happen.  I hope that I can 
get assistance from the community on these tasks.

With all of these Linux and Open Source solutions being implemented at 
Mid-Pac, Mid-Pac will be a Showcase of "Linux for Education" systems. 
We will invite educators from other schools, public and private to let 
them see what Open Source Software can do with low costs and high 
reliability.  We will show them how the community will take active roles 
in implementation and maintenance of Open Source solutions at their schools.


2) St. John the Baptist LTSP lab and Firewall
----------
A while ago Wilson Chan, Ray Strode and I configured a LTSP lab and 
Linux based firewall at St. John the Baptist school in Kalihi.  The 
firewall has been working great, unfortunately the LTSP server kept 
locking up due to hardware problems.  Currently Ray Strode is analyzing 
the server.  We may need to replace the motherboard.  Wayne Liauh had 
donated a complete Athlon system to Mililani High School but it is no 
longer needed (read below about Mililani), so we may be able to use this 
motherboard in the St. John server.  We will also need $50 print server 
appliance for the school.

After the server is made stable, we will need to configure the LTSP 
server to be ready for student usage.  While the K12LTSP distribution 
does most of this work for us, there are many little modifications that 
should be made to the default user profiles in order to simplify the 
desktops for the users.

St. John's LTSP server is only a single 1.2GHz Athlon processor and 1GB 
of RAM, so I suspect this will not be enough power for the 12-15 clients 
that they hope to run.



3) Mililani High School and Linux
-----------
Wayne Liauh had donated a complete Athlon 1GHz system to Mililani High 
School that would be used as a Oracle Linux server.  Later it turned out 
that they had a spare Dell server already at the school and they will be 
using that machine for Oracle on Linux during Spring 2003.  This 
motherboard may be able to stabilize the unstable St. John LTSP server.

Wayne, do you want the parts back if they are not needed, or can I 
appropriate this for another server at some school?

Mililani's SunRay lab is currently working, but poorly configured and 
running ancient software.  During the Christmas break after December 
18th we will need to go into their lab and completely re-install the 
server.  I hope to use the following software on their Sun Enterprise 
450 server: Solaris 9, Gnome2, StarOffice 6 SP1, Gimp.

I will need considerable assistance between December 18th through 20th 
with this server because I have almost zero experience with Sun hardware 
and Solaris.



4) Future Linux for schools projects
----------
I have demonstrated Mid-Pac's LTSP lab to educators from Kaimuki High 
School, St. Louis, and Mililani High School about the possibility of 
implementing LTSP at their schools.  While they were impressed by what 
they have seen, there is a considerable amount of difficulty involved in 
implementation and I ran out of time to follow up.

Fortunately during Spring 2003 I will have much more time to talk to the 
schools and demonstrate LTSP to educators, so hopefully we will be able 
to get this started at more schools during that period.  Please let me 
know if you have any other schools that would be prime candidates for 
this, and try to convince some of their educators (principles and sys 
admins are the best) to check out Mid-Pac's Linux lab.


5) ITEC?
----------
Last month Brian Low said he would arrange for a booth at ITEC but I had 
heard nothing from him since.  Since I have heard nothing about this and 
we have had no planning meetings, I'm assuming that we will not be at 
ITEC this year.  Even if I do hear from Brian at this point it is too 
late, I'm too busy to throw together booth demos and handouts.


Warren Togami
warren at togami.com