Sunday, August 26th, 2007
Well, I am off on an adventure to help my brother set up 120 computers in five days. He is pastoring a church on the Navajo reservation and the aforementioned computers were donated to the organization with which he is affiliated. The PCs arrived with the hard disks and memory modules removed, so the first order of business will be to re-assemble several and make sure they work. Once we get several working computers, we will install the operating system and applications, make sure everything works, and then create an image of the system. From there it should be a simple matter of pushing out the image to each computer.
The tools we will be using include: One Intel Xeon 2.4 GHz Server with an 80 Gb RAID zero drive for image and file storage, one five port switch, one four port wireless router, and enough power strips and network cables to hook up seven PCs at once. The server has dual NICs, so we should be able to run two physical segments at once, with no excessive bottlenecks or speed hits.
We will also be looking into making one of the PCs into a NAS box using FreeNas (http://freenas.org). That is a linux distro that will let a low powered PC run software RAID and basically just exist out on the network with no monitor, keyboard and mouse. Ninety of the PCs are Compaq IPAQs with 1 GHz PIII processors. One of them should make an ideal Network Attached Storage device.
The rest of the PCs will most likely run either Windows 98, ME, or 2000 Professional, since the licensing for those OS’s is already in place. If someone would like to donate about 120 copies of Windows XP Home Edition, we would much rather use that! However, we will deal the hand that was dealt to us, and make everything work properly and legally. For word processing and other normal office uses, we will be installing Open Office.Org, which will read and write MS Office Suite file formats. Open Office is free! Visit http://openoffice.org for more information. Other software will include Adobe Acrobat Reader because it is everywhere, and the other PDF readers such as Foxit have trouble with some of the newer PDF features. Except for that, we will look to Open Source software for the rest of the applications.
Once I get on site, I will try to update the blog with more info and pictures if I have time.
Stay posted!
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Tags: Compaq, FreeNas, Intel, iPaq, JEA, linux, Navajo, Open Office, Open Office.Org, reservation, server, Windows