[SGVLUG] Still shopping for school computers

[Joel Witherspoon]

On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 7:52 AM, Dan Kegel <dank at kegel.com> wrote:

> On Sat, May 16, 2009 at 7:12 AM, Joel Witherspoon
> <joel.witherspoon at gmail.com> wrote:
> > We've saved money in some our classrooms through the use of N-computing
> > boxes (http://www.ncomputing.com/). If you are going to have pods (four
> or
> > more) computers in each classroom, you are looking at spending about
> $2000
> > per room. With the Ncomputing box, you buy one computer and the
> Ncomputing
> > kit and three or five monitors for about $1000 per room.
>
> That's sweet.  Have you had any performance or compatibility problems?
> What boxes did you buy?
> What is the login experience like?
>

 We purchased the 300 box (host workstation and three terminals) which
allowed one host with four monitors and N-boxes as an educational center in
the classroom. The 500 series was debuted at Tech Ed this year. If budget
allows, we will begin to purchase them.

We didn't have computer issues per se, just network issues. The jacks on the
N-boxes and the PCI card are RJ-45 so you can plug them into a wall jack,
but the traffic will have to route correctly in order for the systems to
work. Originally we had it set up this way. We had to create separate
networks for each classroom (with atomic EIGRP routing numbers) in order to
work properly. This setup is not recommended as it creates a huge routing
table with poison routes if a computer goes down. I would suggest buying one
small switch (Netgear $30) for each classroom and switching the N-box PCI
card with that. Let the host computer handle the network traffic (enable QOS
control on the configuration for the card) and it will work well.

The login experience is just like logging into to Windows or Ubuntu (I had
one classroom try Edubuntu for a month -- that's another story). We are a
Novell shop, and we logged into Novell with no problem. The system runs
extremely similar to  or vty with a GUI. If you understand how TTY/VTY runs,
working with these boxes is simple.


-- 
Joel Witherspoon

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