Leigh CTC, Dartford
From Schoolforge-UK
Leigh City Technology College (CTC) is a specialist technology school funded by the UK government, instead of the Local Authority. The college has 2,500 pupils and 300 staff, and is located close to the south side of the River Thames Dartford Crossing, on the east side of London near Dartford in Kent.
By 2002, the College IT facilities were supported by some 20 Compaq ProLiant servers running Novell Netware. The College had also received a large amount of equipment donated by Sun Microsystems, including two Enterprise servers and some 20 SunRay 150 thin clients. Of course, there were (and are) many Windows PCs on the site.
Gavin Spurgeon is now employed full time at Leigh CTC as Assistant Systems Administrator, after first becoming involved on a voluntary basis in 2002. Gavin is a Linux developer who has worked on the Smoothwall and IPCop firewall systems, and contributed the IPCop add-on for Dansguardian web content filtering software. At the time he qualified, Gavin was also the youngest MCSE in the UK. To support his responsibilities at Leigh CTC, he has created a valuable reference source at his K12 Linux HowToz website.
In 2002, the College's Internet gateway server expired, providing Gavin the opportunity to instal a replacement gateway running IPCop on a discarded PC. The greatly reduced cost and improved performance of this machine gave him the credibility needed to take over the Sun equipment, after the original support person moved on.
Gavin showed how SunRay thin clients could be powered by K12LTSP, the educational implementation of Linux Terminal Server Project on RedHat Linux (now Fedora). The SunRays are booted from a Sun Enterprise server, which then passes control to a K12LTSP server running XDMCP (X Display Manager Control Protocol) sessions on the thin clients. This solution proved so successful that another 20 VXL Itona thin clients were installed with K12LTSP, and a further 60+ are coming online in Autumn 2004 bringing the total thin clients to 100+.
The network servers are now replaced by an HP Compaq ProLiant Blade Centre, carrying 8 blade servers, each with dual 3GHz Xeon processors, 4, 6 or 8GB of RAM, and three Gigabyte and one 10/100MB Ethernet cards.
All the thin clients run OpenOffice.org and Mozilla web browser (which are installed with K12LTSP). Almost all other Windows applications, such as some very small 'Old' software that the Maths Dept require & a few small applications in the English Dept, are running under Wine or Crossover Office 3 Pro. The single exception is the the Student Management System, which runs on a native Windows PC.
By 2007, the College plans to replace all Windows workstations on the site with thin clients or other FLOSS systems. This migration will be largely transparent to teachers who all now have laptops running Windows XP, which connect to the network via 56 wireless access points.
Gavin Spurgeon is happy to answer questions about how all this has been achieved, and his email is gsp (at) leighctc.kent.sch.uk. You can also contact him via the K12LTSP mailing list.
