K12LTSP - K12 Linux Terminal Server Project

History
In September of 2002 Riverdale High School opened with computers running Open Source software on Linux based thin clients. This article will describe the installation and configuration of the computers and software.

Riverdale (RHS) is small school and a member of the Coalition of Essential Schools . The school is designed for a maximum of 350 students. In its 6th year of operation RHS moved into a new building in September of 2002. The building is largely new construction. There is a staff of 12 full time teachers with other part time staff teaching elective courses. There is one principal and a 1/2 time counselor. The technology teacher has 2 periods free every day to manage the computer network. RHS students come from a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds but many are from upper middle class families. When surveyed, virtually 100% of students had Internet access from home.

RHS staff have used both Macintosh and Windows PCs for the last 6 years. The school has used Linux as a cross platform file server since it opened in 1996. Teachers are interested in the Open Source concept but are not familiar with the Linux desktop environment. MS Word and Clarisworks are the most commonly used applications behind web browsers and email.

Building Network
Classrooms are wired with CAT5e ethernet. There are two computer labs and one server room. RHS has 240 ethernet jacks throughout the building. The server room has 6 48 port 10/100 Netgear (FS750) switches and 1 16 port 100/1000 Netgear (GS516) switch acting as a backbone. Each of the 48 port switches has a gigabit uplink. In addition to ethernet the school has one SMC wireless access port located in the library in the center of the building. The total cost for installation of all network wiring, equipment racks and electronics was about $45,000.

Diskless Computers
The school has two computer labs with 35 diskless workstations running K12LTSP. Clients were built using Intel D810emo motherboards, Celeron 366 processors, 128mb ram and IBM NetVista cases. Total cost for 70 workstations was under $500 each. Clients boot from the network and have no drives or moving parts other than power and CPU fans. Parents and students assembled and tested the components at a school computer work party. We've tried to provide links below to hardware when possible.

70	Intel D810emo motherboards - These have onboard LAN, Video, Sound and support the PXE network boot protocol. They are FLEX-ATX boards which means that they are small. Intel has discontinued this product. I don't see any current FLEX-ATX motherboards on their web site. These boards are often available on ebay for a good price. The best thing about the Intel D810emo board is the nice video chipset. It's fast and supports multiple resolutions. We can even drive thin clients at 1280 x 1024 with good results. [ Search ebay for d810emo ]	$50	$3,500
70	Celeron 366 CPUs - Donated by Intel via the STRUT program. See application for information on CPUs for K12LTSP projects.	Donated by Intel through STRUT
70	PC133 128mb SDRAM	$20	$1,400
70	Logitech USB Optical Mice - The Intel boards have only USB ports so you can't use a PS/2 mouse or keyboard. The optical mouse is great. No dirty mouse balls to wander off or clean!	$11	$770
70	IBM NetVista Cases (purchased on Ebay) I still can't get IBM to sell us Linux workstations. We tried to get a quote for this project to no avail. Contact hhowardelton@aol.com to get your IBM cases while he still has them. They are small, quiet and look great! We looked at lots of cases. These are virtually silent and are very well made. What else would you expect from IBM? [ Search on ebay for ibm netvista case ]	$16	$1,120
70	NEC MultiSync LCD 1550V - 3 year warranty. Price is now lower... We spent more on the NEC because of the 3 year warranty and past positive experiences with them. They WILL cross ship replacements when needed. We liked the LCD monitors because they only use 30% of the energy of a traditional CRT, are radiation free, don't produce heat and I'm just getting too old to lug those heavy CRT monitors around all day!	$370	$25,900
70	Black USB Keyboards -- We found these using pricewatch.com. There are several vendors who have them at competitive prices. They are made by Lite-On.	$5.00	$350
Total for 70 diskless workstations was $33,040. ($472 each)

K12LTSP Application Servers

4	SuperMicro 1u cases with the P4DPR-iGM motherboard. This board supports Intel Xeon processors and uses DDR memory modules (up to 12 gigs of ram). It also has two ethernet ports, one gigabit and one 100base. It has an ide drive controller but not scsi. We've found that application servers are not disk i/o intensive. It's the ram that is important. The /home folder for all users is exported to each application server via nfs from an older quad Xeon based Intel server with a fast scsi drive. Breakdown on server hardware: 4 Cases and motherboards (4 x $1050) 8 Intel Xeon 1.8GHz cpu (8 x $200) 16 DDR 1 Gig memory modules ( 16 x $450) ouch! 1u case needed low profile, mb needed ECC registered memory... 4 IBM 60 gig ide hard drives (4 x $80) NOTE that we purchased 4 servers with a goal of supporting 100 thin clients. We'll be adding 30 more clients during the year. Our goal was to provide 1 server for 25 workstations. If you're interested in purchasing a server like this, contact Beth Sisemore at: Beth.Sisemore@wesd.org.	$3,330	$13,320
2	Intel Quad Xeon (500 MHz) 2 gigs ram, 36 Gig scsi drive One of these boxes is our /home folder server and web server. We're using the other one as a Windows 2000 Terminal Server for folks that need MS Windows applications. We're using rdesktop to access the Windows terminal server from LTSP thin clients. We're happy to have these giant boxes from Intel but they are overkill in terms of what's needed. It's the Ultra 160 SCSI drive that gives quick access to data. It doesn't take lots of CPU power for a simple file server. Our file server is running both Samba and Netatalk so users have access to their files from any computer OS in the school. We used the standard K12LTSP install CD's to install and configure it. We have multiple network cards, one for the private network in our building and one acting as a gateway for Internet access. This is the default K12LTSP setup.	Donated by Intel through STRUT
MS Windows Software Licenses This one was hard for us to do, both for the cost and the added complexity required when running Windows applications. We purchased licenses for all 100 workstations because MS does not have a concurrent use licensing plan. This means we had to buy a license for every thin client that may access Windows applications even if there are only a few at a time that do. Why did we include the Windows option for students and staff? We wanted everyone to easily choose their OS on a day to day basis based on their needs. It's interesting to note that it took less than 3 hours to have all 4 LTSP terminal servers up and running and the better part of 3 days to get the W2K terminal server installed with software and a seemingly endless series of updates. In the end, our focus is providing technology as a tool for research and learning. We see choice of OS as a good thing. After 4 years at RHS our students will be familiar with Macintosh, Windows and Linux operating systems.
100	MS Access CAL's	$5	$500
100	MS Terminal services CAL's	$32.60	$3,260
100	MS OfficeXP w/Frontpage	$63.60	$6,360
	All licenses were purchased through OETC (Oregon Education Technology Consortium)	Total:	$10,120	($101 for each thin client)

Macintosh E-Macs

Macintosh eMacs - We're using these for digital editing and the iMovie package. We think OS-X is pretty cool and we're already using the GIMP for OS-X on both of our Macs. [ Read about it. || Download it. ] Learn more at macgimp.org/

$999

$1,998

How does it all fit together?

We owe our sanity to LDAP. [ Quick LDAP and PAM How-to by Eric Harrison, our LDAP hero! ]

All of our servers, thin clients, Windows workstations, Windows terminal sessions and Macintosh eMacs authenticate from an LDAP server. This gives us a single point for user administration. It also means that any user can sit down at any machine and do their work.