El lun, 13-07-2009 a las 04:49 -0700, Praveen A escribió: Hello Praveen, welcome > 2009/7/13 Holger Levsen <holger@layer-acht.org>: > > Welcome to Debian Edu! Good luck with your project and have fun!!! > > Thanks. > > > The terminology is a bit complicated: Debian Edu is the name of the Debian > > subproject aimed at producing the Debian pure blend distribution "Debian Edu" > > or "Skolelinux". Linex used to be a different customized Debian based > > distribution _and_ the name of the project to bring Linux in schools in > > Extremadura. Since last year, Linex is not deployed in schools in Extremadura > > anymore, but Debian Edu (with some modifications, like you plan to include > > OpenOffice.org 3.0). > > Thanks for the clarifications. How is the changes needed for linex maintained? > First, a little bit of history: when at LinEx decide to use Debian Edu in our schools we were still using a Debian Sarge derivative and Debian Etch was the stable version. We decide to work on the Debian Edu version for Lenny, but we need to implement it in our schools as soon as possible as Sarge was pretty old. Also, we use Gnome instead of Kde, and our architecture in the schools was a little different from Debian Edu architecture. Not very different, as the services were similar, but we use different applications to do the same (dnsmasq vs bind & dhcpd, as an example). So, we begun to follow these steps about 18 months ago: a) adding the Gnome stuff to the configurations metapackages of Debian Edu b) adding some configurations and uploading a bunch of educative applications to Debian or to the education-xxxx metapackages as dependencies. c) collaborating with Debian Edu to do the "ldapify" of the main services, so , even if the architecture is not exactly the same, the differences are contained in the ldap database, not in the configuration files included in the cd d) We did a pilot in a school for 9 months and prepare the migration of our schools And, after that history, the point that must be more interesting for you: We needed to migrate our schools at the beginning of the past course (Sept 2008 - July 2009). At that time (Sep 2008) Debian Lenny was not still stable, and now Debian Edu for Lenny hasn't been released yet. So to fulfil our needs we: a) Prepared a Debian Lenny installation cd (made with simple-cdd) to install and setup a Debian Edu main server and sent it to our schools b) Prepared an image of the ltsp server and clone the ltsp servers in all the schools. In fact, that cloning was done by an external company as we bought new servers to that company (I haven't told it before but we were using old workstations in the schools, without LTSP and we have migrated those old workstation to thin clients and bought one LTSP server per classroom). Thanks to the "ldapifycation" all the ltsp servers of every classroom of every school are exactly equal. Their behaviour depends on the configuration added to the ldap server of the school. And the main part: - The architecture was already thought in Debian Edu. If you follow the list, most of the problems that are delaying the Debian Edu release are installer problems (and lack of documentation due to lack of man power). So, knowing the architecture and how to implement it, we could do it by hand without needing the Debian Edu cd. - To upgrade smoothly the system and to put fine grained configurations we are using puppet (similar to cfengine but with a more powerful and easy scripting language and a richer developing community). All the main servers are clients of one puppet server we have. So every 30 minutes, they pick up any configuration and apply it to themselves. And every ltsp server is a puppet client of the school main server. So, we begun the massive migration in Jan 2009, and it's being finished now in the laziest ones. Main servers were migrated in a reasonable time, but the ltsp servers and ltsp classroom setup has take more time in some schools (some schools prefered to wait to the end of the classes, some others have problems with the cables or other logistic problems that delayed the beginning of the whole migration). Using Puppet, in our puppet server we can apply any change in the setup or any improvement in less than 30 minutes to all the schools. Also the upgrading to the stable lenny release (to 5.0, 5r1 and 5r2) have been done using it. That's all, if you need further explanations because my spanglish was not easy to understand, don't hesitate in ask for more data. Regards. José L.
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