[Lancaster] Folly Terminals are go!

[Ken Hough]

Martyn and others,

Yep! That about sums up last evening.

I have two more points to make.

The first point comes from more than a few years working with hard nosed 
project engineers/managers. This has taught me that to make good 
progress it is neccssary to clearly define actions to be taken, who will 
do them and when. Otherwise matters drift, become vague and eventually 
dissipate.

I am quite happy to do whatever work I am able to do. I have time and 
enrgy, but am limited wrt some of the expertise needed.

WRT producing advertising/publicity literature, I could do this using 
the likes of SCRIBUS (I've already used this). But I'm not familiar with 
the world of 'advertising'. Who can help me on this one?

WRT the server, we need a clearly defined 'spec' for the server setup. 
As far as I can see, the only active persons with sufficient expertise 
are Martyn, Andy and maybe Max. We need a clear 'spec' if only for 
maintenance purposes.

The second point relates to the idea of providing CD writer facilities. 
  Andy favours having the possibility to download software via the 
server for burning to CD. Is this viable? If, for example, a CD sized 
ISO were to be downloaded via a 10Mbit/sec network, this could hog the 
network for maybe 10 minutes or so. Other users might not be too happy. 
If we had a 100Mbit/sec link to the server, Could the existing server 
handle all the network traffic? I don't know, I'm showing my ignorance here.

Alternatively we could provide a library of CD ISOs on a standalone (?) 
PC which would be readily available for burning to CD. An 80Gb hard 
drive could hold over 100 ISOs. One of the existing PCs could be used 
for this duty. All we need is a CD writer. I suggest that this be at 
least a 20x burner, otherwise there might be a queue for CDs. Don't even 
think about burning DVDs.

I like Martyns idea of providing ISOs of MS Windows versions of 'Open 
Office', 'GIMP', etc. What better way of weaning people off Bill Gates' 
offerings. Also, a standalone PC providing CD burning makes the point 
clearly that Linux is not just for complicated networked setups and is 
just as well suited to Mr(or Ms) Average and his requirements.

If we were to venture into the realms of sound and video processing, it 
seems to me that a standalone setup (ie not remote X) would be the way 
to go. Even on my own Athlon XP 2200/512MB RAM, these tasks can take 
significant periods of time to execute. The existing server (Celeron 
1GHZ ? / 128MB RAM) would stuggle. Also, as Max has already pointed out, 
it's not easy to setup sound cards for 'remote X' operation.

Regards

Ken Hough



Martyn Welch wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> An amazing amount of work seems to have been done in the last month or two.
> The kitchen area looks far better and we now have a few working terminals! A
> huge thanks to Ken and Andy.
> 
> We started to discuss a few things last night:
> 
> 1) System Security
> 
> The system is working, but it wouldn't take someone with too much knowledge of
> Linux to do some real damage. We need to improve security on the system,
> especially the server.
> 
> - The root password has _got_ to change to something far harder to guess
> 
> - The number of packages (especially Desktop Environments) need to be reduced
> so that the environment can be managed easily
> 
> - Priviledges need to be set on account home directories
> 
> - The clients need to have there BIOS passwords set and boot from floppy
> disabled.
> 
> 
> 2) Mission critical kit
> 
> The server is now _very_ important. With out the server the terminals are
> useless. Over time it might make sense to migrate some of the extra services
> of it onto another/other boxes, to reduce the work of rebuilding one of the
> boxes if it fails.
> 
> I think we need to have separate storage for the terminal equipment, for when
> the room is needed for other things. This I suppose includes setting aside a
> set of nice (pref. identical) keyboards and mice for use with the terminals.
> Getting them running after not being used should be very easy and setting
> aside clean nice keyboards will make the setup look far more inticing.
> 
> 
> 3) User accounts
> 
> We need ideas. The best we could think of last night is a set of guest logins,
> one for each of the terminals & the posiblity of creating separate logins for
> advanced/ frequent users (giving them private data storage). Am I right in
> thinking there will be problems with 2 sessions logging in as the same user
> simultaneously?
> 
> 
> 4) Publicity
> 
> It would be nice to get the room in use and also to publicise the LUG, Linux
> and more generally open source software.
> 
> It was felt that it would be nice to get hold of a CD burner and a stack of
> cheapish CDs for the folly and burn copies of Knoppix [www.knoppix.net/],
> Gnuwin [http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/en/index.html] and possibly a very friendly
> distro or two, either for free or a very minimal fee (£1/50p?)
> 
> There is now a large screen in the kitchen space, a scrolling presentation
> with info about the use of the space and availibility of services would be
> nice!
> 
> Posters?
> 
> 
> 5) LUG Organisation
> 
> It would be nice to setup one of the spare machines as a LUG server, with a
> (passworded) WIKI on it for storing configuration info on it and other LUG
> related matters.
> 
> We also need to decide how we are going to carry this LUG forward now.
> 
> 
> I think that'll do for now,
> 
> Martyn
> 

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