Hello Rowan_Crowe!

Wednesday September 17 1997 13:55, Rowan_Crowe wrote to All:

 RC> configured to suit their needs. This improves bandwidth and security.
 RC> Important in this case, as it's a high school!

The local primary school (where my mother works, my sister attends and my
father is on the council) has "recently" become fully networked
and internet connected.

They have a "gateway" machine from SchoolsNet which runs Next
Mach and has squid & sendmail etc installed...

 RC>   * dhcpd -- Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol daemon, for assigning IP
 RC> * firewall -- to prevent

On their network, these are handled by a NT 3.51 server...

 RC> The prime focus is WWW access, so squid has most of a 1.2Gb drive for its
 RC> cache. Things could get a little slow if 10 people are accessing the WWW
 RC> all at once, but the local caching will definitely improve response.

Well, the school has a single 28.8k modem link to SchoolsNet (the ISP)
which serves 50+ Win 95 based PC's on the network, along with 3 28.8k
dialin lines. Mum dials in at 14.4k from home, and the speed is really
quite decent.

Even with 10 PC's 'surfing' at once, we get very acceptable speeds out of
the setup.  I'm not sure on exactly how large the local cache is, but it's
fairly significant.

We had an "internet" night for parents etc near the end of last
year, and with 10-12 PC's all web browsing at once (all connected via
10Mbps Ethernet to the gateway which has the 28.8k link out) it was still
very respectable!  In fact several parents commented that it was faster
than their ISP service from home.

 RC> However, there were no major problems. The only grumble is that to
 RC> configure the DNS, Windows forces you to enter a local host name. Fine for
 RC> one machine, but multiply that by 10... I'm using DHCP to avoid having to
 RC> configure 10 machines separately!

Various systems have been used at the local school to configure the various
systems.  I think the major method was to build one, and then duplicate the
harddisk for the rest of the systems, and since almost all of the systems
were identical, it actually worked out without too much in the way of
hassles.

 RC> As per usual Windows holds my hand and tries to tell me things in laymans
 RC> terms. :) This can be quite confusing, as it would actually make more
 RC> sense to me to use a more technical term.

The biggest "screwup" that they have at the moment, is that since
they have a Windows NT server, they assume that any & all references to
"domain" = the NT domain.  Which is of course totally independant
to the school's Internet domain.    As such those PC's who have been
"reconfigured" mostly have the NT domain in the Internet domain
setup field...  fortunately it all still works!

 RC> Anyway, that's my little ramble for the day (this area should now be going
 RC> up to Sydney!).

:-)   It's nice to know the Windows will happily talk to Freebsd.  We have
at least one Win95 machine here at the moment, and a couple of laptops
running 95 that are often connected too...  I'm still planning to get a
Freebsd machine up & running - there's a lecturer at uni who's willing
to help me through the install etc if I bring my machine in, and since he's
got a fairly extensive archive of software on his personal machine I should
be able to get all that I need in one fell swoop.   Only problem is fitting
in some time between lectures etc that suits him! hehe...

Regards,

        Tony

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