K12LTSP Linux Terminal Server Project for K-12 schools Brought to you by: Eric Harrison, Multnomah Education Service District Paul Nelson, Riverdale School District Special Thanks to: Linux Terminal Server Project Red Hat Ximian Intel Sun Microsystems Portland Linux/Unix Group

What is K12LTSP?  Integration of the Red Hat 7.1, Linux Terminal Server Project, and Ximian GNOME.  The concept is to build a "terminal server appliance", a Linux distribution that was trivial to install and configure which would support booting low-maintaince, low-cost diskless terminals.

Goals and Objectives  Mitigate management headaches. It is a full time job maintaining a school computer lab  Improve reliability. Teachers will not incorporate technology into their curriculum unless it is dependable.  Lower costs. It is quite often cost- prohibitive to put new computers into schools.

Strengths  Centralized management, reliable, inexpensive  Fast! Terminals run at the speed of the server  Inherent remote administration capabilities  True color, no 8 bit color palate limitations  Relatively secure  Possible to run legacy apps  Runs almost all Linux applications

Weaknesses  Floppy, sound, and CD support are not perfected  Legacy app support can be expensive and/or resource intensive  Currently does not support hardware accelerated 3D graphics  Peripheral support is tricky at best  Managing mixed clients can be a pain

Future Enhancements  Eliminate/mitigate current weaknesses Perfect floppy, sound, and CD support Implement web-based and/or LDAP administration Integrate v2.4.x kernel hot-pluggable device support  Improve support for non-standard configurations  Integrate into the core Red Hat distribution?  XFree 4.x support for terminals

K12LTSP boot process  PXE, download syslinux.pxe image  Client downloads kernel using TFTP  Client obtains configuration information via DHCP  Client NFS mounts the server's filesystem  Client generates configuration files on the fly  Client starts X, sends XDMCP query  User logs into server

Network Architecture  Default configuration expects two NICs, the terminals are isolated on their own private network  Private network for the terminals makes it very easy to deploy, the servers can all be identical  SSH & DHCP permitted by default, all other outside connections are firewalled off by default  All applications run on the server, but can be configured to run on the terminals

Conclusions  Initial pilot projects have been very successful, all goals have been met and user feedback has been positive  Logs indicate strong interest with not only K12 schools, but universities, corporations, and third-world countries as well