Setting up a school network.

[iamcowdrunk]

I'm finishing up my senior year of high school and next year I'm getting paid to set up a computer network for my growing school. As of right now there is 30 students and 3 working computers.

First i want to get peoples opinions on the ease of doing that. As in setting it up, reaction from students and if theirs any problems that i don't yet know about...

Because of it being a small school and a very limited budget i plan on buying one ok computer ($800ish) and use the other computers donated to the school that are 5+ years old.

The computer I am to buy will store all the students documents and the students will be logging onto their own account that they can access from any computer.

The one problem i have is then figuring out how to monitor the students on the computers while their using them. and giving them an account with almost no privileges to do anything but browse the internet, use openoffice and print.

can anyone give me their thoughts on the best way to go about accomplishing this?


thank you
.dan

[jethro10]

How about using your good computer as a terminal server so your clients can be any old rubbish.
You get a bit more control here as well. Mind, you need loads of memory in your "server", but after that its suprisingly quick

Its already being done, look here http://www.ltsp.org/ and here https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LTSPHowTo

if you go to here https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ and search for ltsp you get a lot of info.

This seems a common way to solve your problem.

ltsp stands for "Linux Terminal Server Project"

J

[iamcowdrunk]

i do believe that is the perfect thing i was looking for...

thank you very much

[iamcowdrunk]

Just a quick question... how much ram do you sugest for about 10 computers? The best computer has 2 gigs in it and thats the max the motherboard can hold.

[obiyoda]

Check out this article it has some good information about setting up a Thin Client network.
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/linux_terminal_server