[NCLUG] Presentation idea for the future.

[Thomas Loran]

Hello group,

I would like to volunteer to make a presentation about a project myself 
one other colleague just completed.

We just got done deploying 10,000 Linux thin clients on 300 servers to 
46,000 students in 88 schools with centralized management and 
centralized authentication using 100% open source software.  We did this 
in nine months, although it continues to be a work in progress as new 
features are added and existing features are tweaked.   After meeting 
with education users and LTSP developers at a recent conference, we 
think  this is one of, if not the, largest managed LTSP deployment in 
production.

While the centralized authentication feature is currently turned  off 
for political reasons, the system does manage the heterogeneous printing 
environment in each school.  We have centralized configuration and patch 
management.  We have also  deployed a new network management system for 
fault and performance management even though the school district had a 
commercial system.  The commercial system was too expensive and too 
bureaucratic for us to use, so we just did our own and now the whole 
district is  looking at moving to our new free solution.

Previously, they had a handful of windows machines in each school's 
library.  The machines were administered by one person per three schools 
and were frequently broken. Now, the whole  thing is administered by one 
person with proactive network management.  The labor savings alone made 
this a no brainer.

The school district found out that standardized test scores rose 
dramatically when there were computers in the classroom. There was no 
way they could afford to put windows machines in each classroom.  Now 
there are 6 -12 computers in each classroom and the kids could  care 
less that they are  Linux.  They just naturally found the browser, the 
word processors, and some other programs ans started teaching each other 
how to use the systems.

I got this idea after talking to Bob Proulx at a NCLUG meeting almost 
two years ago.  I was able to take some of Bob's ideas  and hopefully, 
make them bigger and better.  I would like the opportunity to return the 
  knowledge back to the community.

Tom