WHAT: NBLUG General Meeting
TOPIC: Subversive Linux at Rancho Cotati HS
WHERE: O'Reilly and Associates, Sebastopol
WHEN: December 11th, 2001 @ 7:30PM
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Greetings all!
This month Lincoln Peters will be doing a talk about what he's been working
on at his high school. Here's his plans in his own words.
---
In the beginning, there was Windows 98 and a third-party security program
called Fortress. During this first year, there was chaos. Rancho Cotati's
new state-of-the-art, Internet-ready computers were not living up to their
expectations, to put it mildly. One teacher received an Internet-ready
computer with _no network cable_, and could not go online with it for a year
and a half! Another teacher received a computer that had such a bad
security scheme that the computer crashed when anybody tried to log in, and
only by disabling Fortress with a boot disk was the computer made usable (the
technician wasn't very happy about that).
The administrators tried to find a better solution, and they turned to
Windows NT. All Windows NT workstations connect to a Windows NT domain
controller in the library. In theory, a user could go to any workstation,
log in, and access his or her account, with no differences in between the
different workstations.
Yeah, right. I had enough experience with Micro$oft products and the school
to know many months ahead of time that their plan was going to be a
disaster. And in early August, I set to work to build a Linux-based system
that could work as a substitute for the Windows NT domain if necessary. Many
of you may remember the long threads of troubleshooting problems between
myself, Mike, Mark, Frank, and others. And, as it turns out, they didn't
even have all the accounts entered into their server until late November.
The final result of all of this is:
1. Insert a boot disk with a customized Linux kernel into a Windows NT
workstation prior to turning it on (I provide the disk to interested
people). A welcome message appears, then the kernel boots. If necessary,
extra kernel parameters can be entered.
2. One frustrated teacher gave me permission to store a server in his
classroom. This server contains an NFS share that can be used by other
computers as a root filesystem. Any computer that boots from one of my boot
disks will go onto the network and mount this NFS share as its root
filesystem, thereby completely bypassing Windows NT.
3. A graphical login screen appears where a user can enter a login name and
a password. I used the same conventions to produce login names and
passwords (login is last name and first 3 letters of first name, password is
student ID#; don't know what they do for teacher accounts so I used first
initial, classroom #, last initial). All students and teachers are urged to
change their passwords ASAP.
4. Once logged in, any user has access to the World Wide Web via Konqueror
(although I'm considering switching to Galeon); basic productivity tasks via
AbiWord, Gnumeric, and Koffice; a personal e-mail account via Balsa (and
basic Sendmail under the hood); and image-editing via the GIMP. It may take
Windows veterans some time to get used to it, but it works. Can you imagine
a sub-$100 WinNT network doing this?
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Hope to see you all there!
Remember - we're meeting at the new O'Reilly facility on the north end of
Sebastopol. If you have any questions on the location or need further
directions, please email and I'll help out as best I can.
-Dustin
--
Founder & President
The North Bay Linux Users' Group
http://www.nblug.org/
dustin(a)nblug.org
