monett_s@cho006.cho.ge.com (05/01/91)
I am looking for some ideas for putting together a PC network in an elementary school. We want to provide two levels of connections. The highest level would link all of the classroom IBM PC machines on a school-wide basis. The lower level would link all of the student machines in a classroom. The IBM machines would be primarily used by the teacher. Important applications would be Email, school calendar, word processing, and lesson preparation. These machines would be a mix of existing AT class machines and some new low-end True Blue machines like the 55SX. The student machines would be used by kids in grades 2 through 5. They would mostly be Apple Macs. These would most often be used with stand-alone instructional applications but the actual use is open to exploration. What is relevant here is that I want to offer some method for the student machines to hook into the school-net for shared resources. This can go in many directions. It may be as rude as using Kermit between the Mac and the teacher's PC and then having the teacher use the school-net to finish the task. At the other end of the scale we could equip ALL machines in the school so that they could use one Novell server and then use the security features to setup a teacher-net and a kid-net. But if you know anything about school budgets these days you know how far I will get with this last idea :-). School buildings cause some problems for wiring the network also. Most offices are set up so that a hub can be used. Our school building is an irregular "U" with a central courtyard. A good estimate of end-to-end distance for all stations would be 200 meters. If the server were in the school office the server would be about 150M from the most distant station. I think that this rules out twisted pair wiring. Can anyone give me some ideas on this? I would like to here from anyone who has done this before. How expensive is it? How much help is there from the vendors and manufacturers as part of an educational assistance program. How hard is it to administer? -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Monett monett_s@cho006.cho.ge.com GE-Fanuc; Charlottesville, VA (804) 978-7946