About . . .The Technology

Classrooms

South Pekin Grade School has embraced the computer as a very useful tool in the classroom. Every class room has at least one pentium computer, many have three, and a couple have four. In addition, there is a lab of 15. A scanner and a digital camera are available for student use as well.

Each room & the lab has one computer hooked to a big-screen TV for ease of presentations or demonstrations.

Servers

File serving is done via a Novell Netware 5.0 server. Our web pages, proxy, DNS, and email (via qmail, not sendmail) are done on a Sparc20 running Solaris 2.6. Our secondary DNS is a 386 running Linux off a couple floppies.

We are experminting with an internal web-server, so that teachers can see what the others are doing, and possibly for student maintained classroom web pages. This is being set up on a Linux box.

Network

For the safety of our students (and for record keeping purposes) we run an internal private-IP network. In order to reach the outside net, you have to proxy through the internet server. We are a member of CIVICNet.

E-Mail

At the moment, only teachers have email, though classroom accounts have been set up from time to time for a class to do a project with, such as pen pals or asking for information.

Naming Scheme

We follow a presidential naming scheme. Our internet began with Washington and Jefferson, two of the first presidents. They were replaced by Garfield and Vanburen, Garfield because the administrator liked it, and Vanburen because it sounded proper and heavy, much like the Sparc20. Lincoln the file server (named for no particular reason) has become Madison, who wrote the Federalist papers advocating a strong central governement. Monroe as the Win95 box running backups for Madison. And finally, Coolidge is the internal web sever, who sits quietly, and doesn't say anything to the outside world.