Date:  April 09  Type:  New Install  Difficulty:  Difficult  Numbers:  32  Image Need:  No

A very late write up of our new maths ICT suite. 

A brand new set of thin clients ready for the Maths department. They used to use terrible laptops which got destroyed and now only contain about four keys each, so time for an upgrade. This new ICT quite was fairly difficult as we were starting for scratch (a standard classroom) so our electrician came in to do all the wiring and trunking needed for the 32 thin clients. After this was done we helped the caretaker cut, place and mount the new worktops and their needed legs. With the basic layout of the room sorted we could finally get onto adding the workstations.

One of the biggest pains of setting up these tiny workstations is the amount of packaging that comes with each thin client, each station has 3 boxes (bracket, monitor and thin client) with each of them containing a huge amount of cable ties, bags and polystyrene. It ends up taking about 10-15 mins just too fully un pack each thin client due to the amount of jump packed into each box. But after they are all unboxed they are fairly easy to setup with just eight screws per each thin client need undoing to add the mountable bracket. With a room like this we have to screw the bases of the monitors to the desk to keep the client rigid during use, this means drilling 60 holes or so into the worktops and monitor stands. Making sure each client was perfectly aligned took some time and calculations. Well with each thin client in place and cabled up it was time to add some software.

A special script has been made for us allowing for fast and fairly easy installs (one you are used to it) of llinux and our needed citirx client. We first start off by booting from one of our specially made USB sticks and installing a base version of Linux Debian along for the custom citirx scripts. Each client then has to be booted into linux to copy over the workstation script needing for the network to recognises and manage the device (As seen in the above image). One or so reboot later the client should be connected to our domain. For this room everything was straight forward apart from two thin clients that really didn't want to be imaged but these were fixed by using a different size USB stick.

Overall the room went well without any challenges but generally took some time as it was a complete refit of a standard classroom. 

 Even the teachers PC had a fair bit of re-wiring.