What I wanted in the first place: an internal web server where my students could publish their
own home pages, using their own username and password. On the most common UNIX freeware applications ...
What I wanted in the first place: an internal web server where my students could publish their
own home pages, using their own username and password.
At the same time, every computer on the LAN must still have access to the internet. To do this you will need UNIX programs called BIND and Apache, which come with most (all?) UNIX distributions, including FreeBSD. A proxy server program called Squid is also recommended to speed up access to the Internet, and you'll need to look into something called "Network Address Translation" or "aliasing".
Of course, if this sounds really scary, remember that for a unix/linux consultant, this is bread and butter stuff. Expect to pay between $700 to $1200 dollars.
Netatalk, a freely available application that runs on UNIX computers, allows you to mount your
home directory (among other things) from the Mac chooser or an alias. Since we already have a Mac IP 5 fileserver,
At-Ease, and Apple Network administrator, and since these Apple products are a marriage made in heaven for computer
teachers, the filesharing part of Netatalk is used only by administrators and for print spooling. An offshoot of
Netatalk called the "a sun patches" does AppleTalk over TCP/IP as well - (I've had this installed for
six weeks now on Ajax and it seems to work fine). File transfer speed is about the same as AppleShare
IP 5.1, and about four times as fast as AppleTalk served by Windows NT.
If you like, you can use Netatalk to subnet your LAN into zones to speed things up, like we did until the P&C bought us a 100B-Fx switch.
Samba does for Windows what Netatalk does for Macs, and quite a
bit more besides. Of course, it is included with most UNIX distributions. This book
by John Blair is the authority on the subject, and shows you how to set up Network Logins and Roving Profiles,
as well as lots of other trade secrets and complicated stuff. Student must have a UNIX name and password
to get past the Windows-95 login screen (pressing the cancel button doesn't work), and each student's Windows "profile"
and user files get stored in their private UNIX home account directory, and you get a record of who logged into
what, and when. This is a Very Big Deal when it comes to computers and kids who don't clean up after themselves...
I've also been experimenting with the Windows95 policy editor - students get one rather restrictive policy, and staff get a less restrictive one. It's been going for a few weeks and seems to be OK.
Samba can also share out CD-ROM drives, and accept print jobs which are passed on to the UNIX print spooler and thence a Laserwriter or a HP Jetdirect laser. Although we don't use this much yet, it might be good for prin quotas.
Below are some screen dumps from a Windows95 computer served by Samba . . .
A screen
dump from our test Windows computer - Hermione and Ajax are both running FreeBSD
and Samba 2.02.
Ajax is the domain master browser and logon controller, and has names and passwords for every student
and staff member in the school.
The Filesharing protocol served by Samba is called "SMB" - its the one native to Windows NT. Note that
there is nothing to stop this computer accessing a Novell server as well, if it were available.
The Apple filesharing product Appleshare IP6 is advertised as supporting SMB as well.
Here you can see that some directories on Ajax are automatically mapped to DOS drives after a successful log in. My home directory has been mapped to P:, a global shared directory has been mapped to Q:, a shared folder for teachers only in on the R: drive, and a shared folder for the clerical assistants is on drive S:. (A student logging in would only see her home directory and the global shared directory).
One other thing I'd like you to notice: Can you see that my home directory (on drive P:) has a subdirectory called "webspace"? Webspace is my home page. Anything I put in the webspace folder is published on the intranet under my username.
For instance, my username here is "e", and the server computer is "ajax". To see my home page on the school intranet, a student would type in the following URL:
http://ajax/~e/index.html
The "~" is UNIX-speak for "the home of".
On one level, perhaps this is all about me having fun in my spare time? On another, it saves us purchasing a separate Windows NT fileserver and software - Samba runs on the same computer as the proxy server. . . saving our school between $6,000 and $40,000 depending on who you talk to.
For students, this is supposed to be about getting rid of floppy disks and making files easier to save and retrieve, and thus making assignments easier to research and produce. It will also mean that I don't have to hide under my table when a student knocks on the door with a floppy disk and a sad face!
The idea, of course, of the "webspace" folder, is that the educational experience of our students may be enhanced if they construct assignments as web pages - particularly for gifted students (often not serviced that well in a rural government High School) and for boys (ditto). But it is just that - and idea. Time will tell if it is worthwhile or not.
At any rate, I believe that only UNIX allows this sort of integration between filesharing and web publishing.
A
portion of a Telnet window running the UNIX program "top", which shows the most active programs running
on the system, among other things. On hermione, our 32 Mb Pentium 120, the system rarely falls
below 95% idle. As well as allowing advanced and inquisitive students shell access from their workstations, Telnet
lets the system operator do almost all administration remotely, either from a workstation on the LAN or by dial
in.