Up and Running!

Over the Christmas break I was able to get 4 out of 6 classrooms up and running. That's 98 out of 150 computers. The inAccess pilot calls for 30 computers per classroom, but none of our class sizes are that large. So we took the number of computers in each classroom that exceeded the maximum class size and re-deployed them to a second social studies classroom.

Of the four rooms that were made operational three teachers took some time to become familiar with things. One of the English teachers wasted no time and had her students logged in and working in StarOffice Writer. One of the rooms is used by an 8th grade Spanish class during one period of the day, and that teacher chose to exploit the technology and had all of her students logged into the website of the text book publisher. Our principal is a very happy man today.

So here are some of the technical details that make our site notable.

1. Novell Linux Desktop 9.0 SP2
2. Novell Client for Linux 1.0
3. Wireless Access Point: Orinoco AP-4000 by Proxim
4. Power over Ethernet provided by a Proxim 4306 (6 Port, 802.3af, DC Injector)
5. Wireless NIC: Netgear WG311 (Ver. 2.0 & Ver. 3.0 chipsets)
6. Wireless printers: HP Laserjet 1022nw

Each room contains it's own WAP. Why? Because 54Mbps isn't a lot of bandwidth compared to 100Mbps to the desktop. But we're only talking internet, file, and print. So I locked each WAP to its own channel, and then I limited the computers to the MAC address of the WAP. I have enough space between my WAPs so I can avoid channel conflicts, and even then I can turn down the power on the radio if I need to.

As we get more time on the system I'll note any issues and add them to this post. In the meantime I'd be happy to answer any questions about other details.