Locked out of BIOS, LTSP won't work right

This summer AEA was the beneficiary of a generous donation of a dozen Dell P4 3.0 GHz towers. I quickly resolved to use these towers as servers for both the inside and outside labs, as well as the library and some classrooms where I anticipated heavy use. Of course at the time I believed that a gig of RAM with a P4 running at that speed would be more than enough for what I was trying to do. I now know better. In any case I quickly came across the minor annoyance of being locked out of the BIOS on about 4 of the donated towers. "Not a big deal," I told myself, I could easily install the LTSP on an unlocked machine and swap hard drives with a locked machine. I followed this procedure with all the affected machines and for over a month believed myself to be golden. My world came crashing down earlier this week after I got all the switches in from Newegg and tried to set up the servers in a middle school classroom to no avail.

The potential problems ran through my head like they always do when I get stumped (which happens embarrassingly often): bad ethernet cable? bad port? problems with the network? problems with the thin client? problems with the switch? problems with the server?

After some basic troubleshooting it quickly became clear that the source of my troubles lay with the server, specifically with the network card settings. For some reason the computer was confused as to which ethernet card was the incoming port from the wall and which was the outgoing to the switch. When I figured this out I grabbed another server from a nearby room and tried it out. Except I had the exact same problem! (I now realize that both of the servers I grabbed had their BIOS locked). Now I was really stumped.

It has taken me two days to finally understand what the true source of the problem is (at least I think I've figured it out). Evidently there is some setting that is changed on the BIOS when Edubuntu is installed that does not get set otherwise. I believe this to be the case because this afternoon I took an unlocked computer with a good hard drive and got it to work fine. Then I swapped the hard drive into a locked computer and ran into the same networking confusion. Swapped back the server worked fine.

So I guess my next step is to email the donor from this summer and hope that he knows what the BIOS password is. Otherwise I'm not sure what options I have. Maybe I can call Dell and figure out some way around the password. Or I could try and guess it. That's never worked for me before but who knows? Cheerio -joe

I have a new focus

Okay, after a long time of trying to decide exactly what this blog would be about I guess I've decided to make it about open source in education. Specifically I will be dealing with issues associated with using Edubuntu in the classroom. I suppose I will still find time to contribute some personal information about myself, but I guess I'll try to title those ones "personal" or something. Mostly I guess I just don't care to have an online diary and would rather put my thoughts and frustrations trying to implement Edubuntu into the Internets so that maybe someone will find it useful and improve the product. So a few things:

Just yesterday I received our order for 35 8-port 10/100 ethernet switches. I plan on using them to setup Edubuntu LTSP miniLANs in every teachers classroom. I'm still waiting on the ethernet cords we ordered so it probably won't happen until next week some time. In the meantime though I'll probably have my tech crew (6 middle schoolers I have been training on tech stuff after school each week) at least start setting up the servers and thin clients in each teachers room.

I finally got the labs both set up. I have my own that has a bunch of donated P3 dell GX150s running at 800Mhz with 128MB RAM and the outside lab with a bunch of donated Compaq P2s running at like 333Mhz with 128MB RAM or something. Here are some pics of the process of setting up just the inside lab (in the pics are the Compaqs, I switched the computers after a few days so the better ones would be inside with me).







So on the first day I'm running 12 of the Compaqs in the inside lab computers off of a 3Ghz P4 Dell with 2GB DDR400 Dual Channel RAM and I have my first class of kindergarteners go to this alphabet flash game on the bbc site and the thin clients all run like molasses! I was so disappointed. I did have some extra ram so I bumped it up to 4GB but they still ran terribly. It was impossible for the students to do the assignment. After school I tried to go to the bbc game under Windows 2000 and it ran nearly as slow so I figured it had to do with the thin clients' processor and switched all the Compaq's with the Dell's with some help from the librarian and my Tech Crew. The problem seems to have been fixed a little bit, but when I watch the system monitor on the Server the CPU is pretty much maxed out with 12 thin clients. I think I need to look into getting a better server because I really want to do some cool stuff in the inside lab. I'm hoping to use kompozer for webpages and Google Earth and definitely some fun games for free time rewards. Plus, what if I want to use Kino or do some podcasts? So I'm not sure what the relationship is for what kind of servers and thin clients are needed for that level of computing but everything I read seemed to suggest that I had adequate levels of equipment. I'm guessing those sources were referring to simply being able to power the thin clients and to use them for any serious tasks would require more power, but this was never clearly stated and now I find myself in the unenviable position of needing another 3k or so to buy my new Dual Xeon server. Hopefully future guides will provide some sort of graph or chart to illustrate exactly what kinds of processes are capable of being executed with a given server/thin client setup. I know I would have appreciated one (still would!) Until next time. -joe