Linux in Schools

[Sean]

Have you looked at tying Samba in with LDAP? I have heard of it being
done, I haven't heard of anyone tying in LDAP with the Mac services. 

You might _also_ look at Caldera's stuff. They are porting (or have
ported) the Novell NDS to Linux. (it cost like 150 dollars for the
package. I _know_ you can use the free stuff although it is a little bit
harder to setup im sure. 

MacOS 9 is definately the way to go for the Mac Services. You can do
tcp/ip file, and print services. 

I don't understand why your having such a hard time doing it for me it
took about 5 minutes. The ONLY thing I can think of is either your being
blocked by a router or its trying to become a zone router, and you already
have one setup. Im definately curious why it isnt working correctly. 

Also, if it would help, I probably can ask to get a mailing list setup for
Linux in schools, for everyone in the state on the states servers. I know
Holt uses a lot of Linux, Mason I guess is starting to use it now. I am
sure these arent the only two districts in the state that use it. 





On Mon, 20 Mar 2000, Mike Rambo wrote:

> Sean wrote:
> 
>       http://www.freshmeat.net/news/2000/03/18/953441940.html
>       (from yesterdays freshmeat.)
>       This is a link to advocacy of linux in schools. Its well
>       written and
>       features neat links to various projects which might be
>       interesting to
>       those not even involved with education. (Visual TCL/TK comes
>       to mind.)
>        
> 
> I'm definitely interested in this.  But...
> 
> <rant>
> 
> ...unless it becomes a little easier to setup and administrate Linux I
> don't see how this will happen.  LSD had an entirely Novell 3.12 and Mac
> environment until a couple years ago.  While the Mac servers *may*
> survive the Novell almost certainly won't.  LSD started a shift to NT
> almost two years ago.  I don't want anything to do with administrating NT
> but unless I can *demonstrate* that Linux is a viable alternative, NT is
> the way it will go - possibly even for Mac services.  The school district
> (currently) has 43 buildings of which seven or eight (elementries) are
> either completely or partially mac.  All the high and middle schools were
> moved to NT.  The remaining elementries are Novell 3.12.  One of the guys
> that would need to be convinced works here in the shop  with me and
> watches while I struggle to try to make things work.  He has been mildly
> impressed with how Linux works for the things I have been able to make
> function but I can tell he's put off by the hours, days, or weeks spent
> in getting it to happen.  Linux works well right now as a windows file
> manager using Samba, at least in our shop with only three workstations. 
> We are also using it as our router/gateway to the internet - for that it
> works great.  We're using it for DNS so we can assign names to various
> resources inside the district WAN - that works very well too.  It's
> working fine as a print server for our HP OfficeJet too.  As I said, he
> likes what I've been able to make work but he's of the opinion currently
> that it is too difficult to administrate to scale it up for use in even
> an entire school to say nothing of 43 of them.  There needs to be a
> better way than smbpasswd to setup users/passwords for a few hundred
> users - many of which change every semester.  I've been working most of
> last week with Sean to get Mac services working and can't figure that
> out.  I haven't even tried Novell services yet.  The condition and
> usefulness of Linux How-to's to anyone who has not been involved with
> Linux for a decade is limited at best.
> 
> </rant>
> 
> I would really like to further the success of Linux, and do it right here
> where I work.  But the bottom line is that I need to apply some polish to
> how Linux works day in day out and I don't know enough yet to do that. 
> And when something new is added (like the mac services that came up last
> week - and mail services that have been hanging out there for a couple of
> months) Linux needs a set of resources that work for the typical people
> that will be trying to use them coming from the windows mindset.  Windows
> may indeed be, and I think is, broken - but they make it look easy.
> 
> Sorry for the long rant but Sean's link definitely hit's a nerve here.
> 
> Mike Rambo
> Lansing School District
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