[519] in Resnet-Forum
PC's in Dorms for Bernard Hecker
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bruce=Mathew%CCAdmin%SJC@dante.sai)
Tue Feb 28 10:18:09 1995
Date: Tue, 28 Feb 95 08:24:48 CST
From: Bruce=Mathew%CCAdmin%SJC@dante.saintjoe.edu
To: resnet-forum@MIT.EDU
Cc:
Saint Josephs' College has about 99% PCs vs. very few Macs. So, I suppose we
could say we have seen most of the problems you are experiencing.
Some background: We are running Banyan Vines on Ethernet via fiber, Coax and
UTP. We have about 1100 users. 175 Pcs and about 15 Macs, 8 SUNS. We have
about 600 dorm rooms wired with about 55 current student connections in use.
We tried renting the cards to the students, but it was too much of a
headache. We now have it worked out where the students buy the cards and if
they want to sell them back to the underclassmen they can.
Some of our tricks: With the multiple version of DOS, we ended up building
batch files on install disks to determine the system specs and ask the
installer the correct questions to install the correct version of drivers for
each version of DOS. This made the install of all the network software much
easier. We use Student assistants to do all this, we haven't found very many
generic students who can take this on by themselves. No matter what, every
machine is a custom install in one way or another.
Of course, I haven't even mentioned the fact that there are hundreds of
different network cards available. We have restricted our users to a couple
of reliable cards and this makes our lives much easier.
We have built front end menus ourselves so that most applications are called
from a DOS level. To be honest, we are just scratching the surface with
Windows. We don't make any changes to the Students version of windows. We
do have a "somewhat secure" network version on the server for specific
windows software that we made generic so the programming classes could use
windows based software and the hackers couldn't make changes for everyone to
see. (so far...:) Our biggest problem so far has been the multiple version
of video drivers we find on the PCs. With a server installed version of
windows to use, it doesn't recognize other video drivers and we have been
bitten several times by this.
We all have experience with the changing technology, but every new machine
that comes in is a whole new ball game. There always seems to be something a
little different....
I'll stop now, but if you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a
line at brucem@saintjoe.edu.
========================================
Bruce Mathew Internet Address
Director Of Computer Services (brucem@saintjoe.edu)
Saint Joseph's College
Rensselaer, IN. USA
We're in uncharted territory now, making up
history as we go along.
T2
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