[luau] 9/10/2002 - MPLUG Status... HELP!

Warren Togami warren at togami.com
Tue Sep 10 22:48:00 PDT 2002


MPLUG Status 9/10/2002

Warren is Busy
--------------
I'm really busy with school and there's tons happening below.  HELP!!!


Warren speaking at BILUG meeting September 21st
--------------
I've been invited by Big Island Linux Users Group to speak at their next
meeting about our Linux for Schools efforts on Saturday, September 21st
at University of Hawaii Hilo.  They will have some educators at that
meeting too.
http://cs.uhh.hawaii.edu/BILUG/
BILUG homepage


Computer Expo is Canceled
--------------
I've just been informed by Dave Kobashigawa that Computer Expo 2002 will
be cancelled.  Official announcement is due out soon.
Crap.  There went our two booths for 5 days and two keynotes, including
the "Linux for Schools" keynote that would have been to 200-300
educators.  I hope we can find another expo or convention where we can
exhibit and have that keynote.  Any ideas?


Two Linux Training Classes in Town
--------------
CompUSA and Terabiz locally have upcoming Linux classes for some kind of
Linux certification.  I don't remember the details at the moment, I will
need to dig those up.  Will post again later about this.


CompUSA "Linux for Business Demo Day"
--------------
Sunday, October 6th
Ala Moana CompUSA Training center
Jimen, Dan or somebody please summarize about what's going on regarding
this.  Until somebody posts a summary you can read about the planning
for the CompUSA Demo Day in the LinuxBusinessHawaii mailing list
archives:
http://videl.ics.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/linuxbusinesshawaii


IBM/RedHat meeting?
--------------
Dan, what is the status of these upcoming meetings?


Non-Profit Corporation Registration
--------------
Sorry Scott I didn't get a chance to call you yet.  Perhaps we should
discuss on list about the corporation registration stuff (except for the
board choosing) on list because the Articles of Incorporation will be on
public record anyway.  We need some of the following:

* Choose the Foundation name.
* Fix up our Articles of Incorporation
* Pick initial board members
* Some smaller details like mission statement will need to be written. 
I'm thinking about this.  Any suggestions?


Hawaii Linux Mirror situation
----------------
UH got a bit angry with Videl today when she began pushing 50-70mbit/sec
consistently all day due to the release of Linux Mandrake 9.0 rc2.  I'm
forced to throttle Videl down to 10mbit/sec for now until I clarify the
situation.  I suspect that I will not be able to get more bandwidth. =(

I am now hoping that I can get a mirror onto Oceanic's network in order
to improve accessibility to the majority of us in Hawaii.  We were
limited between UH and Oceanic by a 10mbit link.  I suspect that if we
can get a mirror onto Oceanic's network we can have high bandwidth to
Roadrunner people, and rate limited bandwidth to everyone else.  If
Oceanic agrees to a Linux mirror, we will need to provide a server.  I
will ask for donations when/if this occurs.

Are there any other ISP's or businesses out there willing to provide
some Linux mirroring?  I can help you setup automatic mirroring of
whatever you wish to mirror, and limit bandwidth utilization to protect
your network resources.  Please let me know.


St. John LTSP lab configuration
---------------------
In the past few weeks Wilson Chan and I have installed 12 LTSP clients,
LTSP server and Linux firewall at St. John the Baptist school in
Kalihi.  The firewall was rather complicated to setup with four NIC's
and iptables configuration to handle Internet NAT and inter-VLAN routing
between 3 VLAN's.  Big thanks goes to MonMotha and Ray Strode who were
instrumental in getting those complicated rules working properly.  Can
someone post those rules for public record?  It might be useful to
somebody, even just academically.  This Firewall is also running Squid
proxy cache and Eric Harrison's SquidGuard package for content
filtering.

The LTSP server and thin clients are working but in need of severe
amounts of software configuration.  Experienced Linux people are needed
in order to prepare it for student use.  Several of the tasks pending:
* StarOffice 6.0 installation
* StarOffice profile scripting to get rid of the "Workstation Install"
* Gnome defaults including:
** File associations
** Menu cleanups, make it as simple as possible
* Mozilla simplification and privacy defaults
* All of the above changes must propagate to all users automatically
* Figure out how to make floppy drives on thin clients simple to use for
end-users.  This one is a biggie, fairly difficult, but possible.
I will post more details later.


Oracle server for Linux experience needed
---------------------
Wayne Liauh donated a 1GHz Athlon machine to be Mililani's Linux Oracle
server.  Unfortunately I'm too busy to work on it, so I'm giving all the
parts to Elayne who will put it together and configure the server.  We
will need help to figure out Oracle on Linux.

I think this box as only 256MB RAM.  We will probably need more RAM.


Mililani's Intel NetExpress Pro/100 problems
---------------------
Mililani's Celeron lab seems to be working okay behind their Linux NAT
box isolating their lab from the school network, but ultimately I'd like
to replace their Novell 4.10 print server with a Linux server running
Samba for their print queue (while adding file services.)  Main problem
that I see in this is that we seem to be completely unable to reach the
Intel NetExpress Pro/100 control panel through any TCP/IP means.  The
diagnostic printout shows that it has an IP address, but it doesn't
respond to any type of requests or pings.  Any ideas?


Computers Needed for Thin Clients
------------
When setting up the St. John lab we figured out that the majority of the
machines currently at Mid-Pacific are almost unusable for thin clients. 
All of the 60MHz and 100MHz IBM's from Castle & Cooke turned out to have
one of two problems: zero PCI bus master slots or incredibly crappy
video boards.  We also have a bunch of non-PCI bus master HP Vectra's,
and several AT Pentiums of questionable quality.  In any case we can't
use an ugly hodge-podge of machines like this for future thin client
deployments... it is a maintenance nightmare even if we do figure out
little hacks to make each model work.

We are in serious need of more sources of computers.  Please let me know
if you find any more sources.

Dan, what happened to the CompUSA computers that John had?  We could
really use those now.


Mid-Pac's KCC3 LTSP Lab
----------------------
I need to redo Mid-Pac's LTSP lab server with the latest software. 
Damn, more work.


Mililani SunRay Lab
----------------------
Currently Mililani's SunRay lab is in production, limping with an
incredibly poorly configured CDE, StarOffice 5.2, Netscape 4.x and
Internet Explorer 5.x.  I cannot conveniently install more useful
software like Mozilla and StarOffice 6.0 because their partitioning
scheme is a bit screwy, with almost zero free space except for the home
directories.  The students currently have no convenient way of changing
their passwords, which is a problem because their passwords are derived
from their name.  Current software:
Solaris 6 or 7 (?)
CDE
Netscape 4.x
Internet Explorer 5.x
StarOffice 5.2

A complete reinstall of the server is needed in order to more sanely
partition this thing and guarantee that it is secure.  I want to upgrade
it to:

Solaris 9
Gnome2
Mozilla
Internet Explorer (whatever is latest for Sparc Solaris)
StarOffice 6.0

They're letting me borrow a SunRay terminal in order for me to practice
server setup at home.  I hope my UltraSparc 5 can handle this.  I may
need some heavy Sparc/Solaris help soon.

The complete re-installation of their Sun Enterprise 450 server should
occur either mid/late October or Christmas break.  I could use help then
too in order to get it done quickly and properly.  I will post when that
date is finalized too.


Mid-Pac's second LTSP Lab
-----------------
Mid-Pac wants to build another LTSP lab near the gym.  I hope we can
scrounge enough computers.

Warren Togami
warren at togami.com





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