Wandering Knowledge

I recently attended OpsCamp in Austin this past Saturday and what a great event! The focus was basically system operations in a cloud-y world. I love going to events like this, especially because of the draw of talent and knowledge it brings in. The tough part is getting back home and trying to keep the momentum and energy obtained by attending, while taking care of everything else at work.

While at OpsCamp, I had a chance to discuss with a few people some of my thoughts about how my school district’s region could benefit from a consolidation of services into a more cloud-based infrastructure. Within Region 15, there are roughly 45 school districts, ranging from small 1A school districts to large multi high school districts. I don’t have the numbers with me, but I believe _most_ of the districts are relatively small rural school districts. I work at one of them. These are the districts I see as being able to have the most gain in what this post is about.

My region has recently embarked on a project that will tie most (if not all) districts together through a wireless WAN that ties back to our service center, and then out to the Internet. Without getting into the “technical” specifics of the WAN infrastructure (some could argue about the actual bandwidth a school gets), it’s basically a 50-100Mb link between each “hop”. This ties the districts together with much higher bandwidth between schools than any of us previously had. This newly acquired bandwidth is where I see several new opportunities for us small schools to experience both CapEx and OpEx savings.

Most of us are all basically doing the same thing when it comes to infrastructure and operations. There’s quite a bit of redundancy between schools, especially the smaller ones. Most of us smaller schools only staff one or two in the technology department. Some districts pay anywhere from $3,000 to $40,000 or more for “maintenance” contracts, which to me, is basically having some company and their technology resources on retainer. The more you pay, the more “credits” you get, which equates to some amount of clock hours. Several of the schools use these “credits” for server and infrastructure work.

So basically, the idea goes like this – let’s move as many of these services and operations as we can to a centralized datacenter that can be staffed by people who are more specialized in some of those areas than what the school district can provide. We already have several services that offered at the regional service center, such as e-mail, web hosting, etc. A new project on the horizon is that our SIS, employee, and requisition system will soon be housed at the service center, along with several other districts in a SaaS offering.

I see the majority of benefit going to the smaller school districts since they are typically the least staffed. I know from talking with a few technology directors that they are willing to push off a lot of their servers, and thus operations, to someone else (preferably within our region). Some of the “services” that have been talked about that should be an easy transition include monitoring, off-site file storage (backup, media and streaming content, etc), development environments, and possibly help desk support. Some of the more ambitious services I’ve spoken to a few people about includes the desktop environment and cloud services. With working on making the transition to a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), there are options available to move the “management” of the desktop images to a central point, while still allowing each district to use their infrastructure to provide authentication for the desktop users of VDI. Regarding cloud services, it’s no secret to those that know me that I’m a cloud nut. I’ve been toying around with Eucalyptus (Ubuntu server’s cloud of choice), OpenQRM, and OpenNebula. I like all three and could write an entire blog posting on each. The idea for the regional schools is roughly the same as the general idea provided by Rackspace, Amazon, and similar. For those within school districts that I’ve talked to about cloud services, the trust of having their data out there managed by someone else just isn’t there. However, providing similar services within a regional datacenter is a little more appealing. The infrastructure would be managed by people these districts trust and already allow to manage other services and data for them.

We have a regional technology meeting in the next few weeks and I hope to have some good discussion on the topic. I’d also be interested to hear your thoughts. I know there are other regional areas out there doing this, but I’m always interested in learning about what others are doing.

Okay, so I posted to Twitter that I was looking for school districts in Texas that were using Ubuntu desktops. It’s no secret that I’m a Ubuntu advocate, as well as open source in general. I use Ubuntu for most of my servers and will soon be (hopefully) moving several lab and classroom desktops to Ubuntu. Other than posting to Identi.ca and Twitter, I did a relatively quick search for “Texas school Ubuntu k12″ and realized that I didn’t show up on any of the first three pages of the search (I didn’t show up on the fourth either, but that’s not the point). I decided to write a post about it so that I could at least hopefully start to get it out there.

If you or someone you know uses Ubuntu (or even any Linux distribution) on some or many of the desktops at your K-12 school, please reply or get in touch with me. Mainly, I’m just curious, but I would probably like to get in touch with you.

I finally carved out some time, re-requested an evaluation license, and installed Virtual Bridges VDI.  I’ve been impressed with what I’ve read so far and have been wanting to try this for a few months now.  Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Virtual Bridges provides a solution for running Windows and Linux guests in a virtualized environment to be offered out to thin clients, thick clients, home users, and disconnected users (utilizing virtualization on the client side).

This morning, I installed a fresh copy of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) on a “spare” Dell PowerEdge 2950.  After the install, I did my updates and minor tweaks, then installed the 64-bit VERDE package from Virtual Bridges.  Following their documentation, I installed the VERDE KVM drivers, to take advantage of the Linux kernel’s virtualization/hypervisor technology.  After that, still following their documentation, I created a Windows XP SP3 guest and a user for that guest (”student”).  After updates and tweaking (for a “golden image”), I published and deployed the XP guest to the student account.  I then booted their LiveCD ISO (customized Ubuntu 9.04 system with the VERDE client installed) on an Acer netbook.  Works like a charm!  I gave the XP guest 512MB of RAM, but I’ll likely bump it to see if it makes a difference (seems a tiny bit sluggish).

In the next few days, I’ll create a Windows 7 guest and test it out.  I’ll also hopefully get with one of the teachers soon to test out Plato and a few other “Windows specific” applications to see how well they perform in the VDI environment.  So far, I’m impressed and excited.  The evaulation license has 26 more days on it and allows me to have 10 concurrent users.  I’m anxious to see how well it performs.

Hopefully in the coming months, I’ll get a chance to evaluate their cluster and cloud branch, as well as their SMART client (for disconnected and mobile clients).  I can see the cloud branch as a solution offering for our regional (Region 15) school districts.  It basically allows for centralized management and maintenance of guest images, but allows for distributed local authentication.  Each school district would use an image from the centralized repository, but clients would authenticate off of their own district’s local servers (whether it be Active Directory or other).

Here at Winters ISD, we’ve been fortunate to have acquired some new equipment a few months ago that will not fully be used until this summer.  That has given me some time to experiment with various open source cloud infrastructures.  The projects that I’ve been looking at include:

• Eucalyptus
• Enomaly
• openQRM
• OpenNebula

Both Eucalyptus and OpenNebula are included in the repositories for the newest version of Ubuntu (9.04).  With all things considered, I think I’m going to focus my efforts on Eucalyptus.  Some of the main reasons are that it’s now a focus for Canonical, it’s interface is compatible with Amazon’s EC2, S3, and EBS interfaces, so basically any third-party tools “should” work with Eucalyptus, and they just landed $5.5M in funding. I’m an Ubuntu guy, and with Canonical focusing efforts toward an Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud using Eucalyptus, it seems a great way to go.

I’m keeping track of my thoughts, ideas, and progress at the Region 15 SchoolTech wiki.

I’ve mentioned the idea to a few people and have received some great feedback. The idea is a quarterly (most likely) publication that highlights some of the projects and accomplishments happening in the PK-12 and higher education sectors regarding open source use. Some obvious topics immediately come to mind, such as Moodle and Joomla! (among others), but I would also like to have articles cover some of the not-so-well-known open source projects making an impact in education. I would really like to highlight some of the schools that have implemented open source and try to encourage participation by other schools.

Now, I know that I have quite a bit to learn about putting together a magazine, but as I get more into it, I really hope to start making progress toward a rough draft of something that resembles a worthy source for open source and it’s use in schools. If you have any interest in helping, please feel free to send me a message.

Now that I’ve installed the Wordpress app on my iPhone, I should have no excuse for not keeping up. Though it’s more tedious to use the iPhone to type up a blog entry, I have a feeling I’ll be using this app relatively more often.

I’m still contemplating organizing another Open Source Symosium this year.  I may put it off until next year since I’m strapped for “free-time”.  I had thought about trying to move it to Dallas, but my wife recommended that I keep it in San Angelo (afterall, the main purpose for having it in San Angelo in the first place was to bring an open source conference to this area).  There have also been thoughts of taking it to Austin, but again, the same reasons against taking to Dallas apply.

I’m also working on putting together a presentation on Edubuntu Classroom Server for schools in our region (Region 15).  I would like to do a half day workshop and let those interested “test drive” the thin client setup.  It would help if they were able to test some of the applications that they use in the classroom or lab on a daily basis.  It would be nice if something like this helped address the online testing requirements.

I’ll try to post updates on my progress of the Edubuntu Classroom Server demonstration.

Wow, I’m already falling behind in my mission to be an avid blogger.  Quite a bit has happened in the past two months, and I have a few things I’d like to post.  Most recently, I’ve just returned from a 2-day meeting in White Oak (very long trip) that stretched out to a four day trip for me and my family.  I’ll get something up about that in the next few days.  I also need to post an update about my job change.  It’s bedtime now, but I’ll work on it in the next few days.

After various attempts at blogging, I’m finally go to go all out and do my best to keep this one going.  My hope is that I’ll actually have some good information to share and that _somebody_ will benefit from this.  I’m also hoping that the more I write, the more likely I’ll be to get to a point where I’ll be able to give presenations.  With the various conferences I’ve hosted, I’ve yet to give a talk (other than the typical “Welcome” at the beginning).

I’m also hoping that by doing this, I’ll start to network with a few more people, particularly in the educational technology area.  I start my new job at a school district on September 8th.  I’ve gone back and forth about staying in higher education vs. working in a school district, so this new job should help me decide.

I know this isn’t much for a first post, but I’m writing this at work and should probably get back to finishing up my todo list before making the transition.  Feel free to comment (not that anyone will read my blog anytime in the near future) or contact me directly.  I’ll put my information up on my ‘About‘ page.