[WEB4LIB] Re: Patron Internet Machines

[Bill Jordan]

We've added over 250 additional public workstations over the last 18 months
(for a total of 360) and no support staff, so we had to address the
reliability issue. We migrated the machines to NT Workstation 4.0, and set
NTFS and registry permissions to prevent users from making destructive
changes (we reset temporary changes when a new session starts).  We don't
use any 3rd part security products, just native NT security. Almost all of
the trouble calls we get now are for hardware failures, and we've reduced
the number of those significantly by upgrading and standardizing hardware.
We are down to only 4 PC models for public workstations (2 Dell Optiplex
models and 2 PC clone models).

We release new software images about 3 times per year and use Ghost to
distribute them.  Preparing and testing a new image is a non-trivial
exercise and takes one of our senior systems administrators about a month.
But staff can rebuild a machine just by changing an .ini file, inserting a
floppy, and rebooting.  It takes about 15 minutes to complete an unattended
rebuild.  We've just started using Ghost's multicast feature, and now
rebuild 20+ machines at a time.

***************************************************************************
Bill Jordan <bjordan at u.washington.edu>
Head, Distributed Computing Systems
University of Washington Libraries, Box 352900, Seattle, WA  98195-2900
(206) 685-1625
***************************************************************************


----- Original Message -----
From: <daemon at u.washington.edu>
Newsgroups: uwash.web4lib
Sent: Tuesday, September 12, 2000 11:39 AM
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Re: Patron Internet Machines
...<snip>

> I am wondering if anyone else is having problems with keeping Internet
> Stations up and running and what solutions have you found to rectify the
> problem.