I am probably going to take over the "IT" at my Taiwanese K12 that has been on autopilot for about two years. I've got some minor Linux admin experience and have been a general user since the 90s, but I'm not a pro by any means. I'm pretty much the only guy around here who knows what DNS, DHCP, PXE, etc is. Our current situation:
Statically addressed network on a /24 IPv4
A mix of XP, 7, and 8, mostly Home
Home means no domain, of course
Google Apps (I implemented this almost two years ago) so we don't really need a VPN into the school or anything AFAICT.
BYOD everywhere, desktops, laptops, tablets, and phones.
A 34 computer lab of frozen XP machines still on IE7 (!!).
As you can guess by the edu setting, there's a very limited budget. Seeping purchases of new hardware or licenses isn't going to happen, though of course some will be possible.
The first order of business is to fix the computer lab and get the classroom computers off of XP. (OK, the first thing after a massive inventory.) For the lab, I have tested and am happy with PXE booting custom live ISOs of Deepin Linux with a choice of language at boot. The classroom computers are a more difficult proposition.
I'm considering moving most of the teacher computers to a Samba 4 domain using Zentyal, eventually moving over to home drives (Windows and Linux). Is anyone using this in production? I have done the Linux / LDAP / NFS side quite a few times now and think I could get this done without a nice UI on a server, but I'm considering Zentyal because at some point, I'm going to leave the school and I need to be able to hand whatever I do over to someone else.
How do I handle BYOD devices if we move to a domain?
So ... overall, I'm looking for advice about the massive number of things I have on the ToDo list and about Zentyal specifically. I'm of course open to other options.
Thanks in advance.
p.s.There's no requirement for me to take this job, but I will be at the school for the XP implosion that is sure to happen if I don't step up.
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