I'm helping out in an elementary school computer lab filled with Macs and I'm a PC guy. The lab has not had a lot of love and knowledgeable attention over the past two years so my first job is to help set up some basic systems, repair some of the basic pieces that were put in place and have fallen apart and set up a few things I'll need for the work I'll be doing. For all the questions below assume I have excellent PC proficiency, good hardware skills (but all PC) and a reasonable budget for buying important pieces to make the system work (not to turn it into the dream lab of a rich private school :-)
In terms of usage on the machines, it's a lab for an elementary school, so no heavy network traffic, but I will be doing lots of work with graphic design projects and directories of pictures stored on the server that students will access, so with a class full of kids looking at pictures, that is probably the heaviest load the system will face.
First question, about the basic hardware. The server is on a 450 mhz PowerPC G4, 640mb ram with a 73 gig Seagate scsi hard drive (ST173404LW) running hfs+ filing system. The hard drive is 90% full. I'm betting I'll need to either add an additional hard drive or replace the current one and I'm all ears for the easiest way to do this. Is the 640 mb ram a problem and worth upgrading? I didn't write down the specs on the memory, but I'm guessing the memory is pretty standard and not that expensive?
The student machines (22 of them) are 1.83 ghz, intel core duo, 512 mb 667 mhz DDR2 sdram with 120 gb hard drives. The machines are about two years old. The student machines are running OS X 10.4.10.
So a question about how upgrades work on Macs, is it worth it upgrading to 10.5 or 10.6 or probably not given the low tech stuff we're doing in the lab? I take it one has to pay for upgrades, it's not just a question of downloading them and installing?
So once I get either a new hard drive added in or the old drive replaced and a new bigger one installed, I need to set up a filing system where each class has a folder and inside each class folder, each student has a folder. Given that I'm working with k-5th grade students, I want to keep this reasonably simple (for them being able to save to the correct location), but I'd love to minimize kids messing around with or just screwing up other kids stuff. If there's any great how to info online for how to set up a directory system or its easy to explain (for someone who knows very little about Macs and Mac server), this is one of the major pieces.
I'll be installing a pair of new printers and one of the issues the classes have had is an over zealous use of the print function. These kids print everything and are single-handedly going to raise the global temperature a degree or two :-) I'd like to have some easy way of authorizing print jobs rather than letting them print directly themselves (at least going this way in the beginning till I get the printing bug trained out of them).
This leads to a next need, to be able to refer to each student computer by name. I need to know the name of each computer and if there's an easy way to assign a nickname or change the name to something meaningful to me (wall-1, door-2, etc. or just lab1- lab22). That would facilitate me letting a computer have access to the printer.
The last piece that seems a bit more difficult is that four of the machines in the lab don't have the same disk image that the other machines have. Most of the machines in the lab boot into a log in screen with three identities available and when they select student, it takes them to a screen saying Kaiser Mac Lab and has all their software lined up and a few general info messages. Four of the machines just boot straight to the operating system. Does Mac Server have built in software for copying a disk image from one of the machines that works and imprinting that image onto a machine on the network? Is it something beyond the scope of this already large question, is there an easy link to instructions for how to do it or if it's not too bad, I need to get it taken care of.
Last question, does anyone have a favorite OS X server book they think is well written and helpful for basic questions like these?
I get this is a pile of questions, that's why I upped the points. I can split them as needed or if one brave soul can answer it all, I'd appreciate it.
I've been poking around on the internet and I can't say I've found any great online resources for how to do basic things with Apple server. First question, does anyone know a
